The original Middleton Hall, in the Tywi Valley, Carmarthenshire, south Wales, built by the Middleton family in the early 1600s, was sold in 1776 to the land agent Philip Lloyd, who sold it to the wealthy East India Company ‘nabob’ William Paxton in 1788. He rebuilt the Hall and landscaped the estate.

My great-great-great grandfather Edward Hamlin Adams bought Middleton Hall after Paxton’s death in 1824. When Edward Hamlin Adams died in 1842, he left his property to his son Edward Adams (who changed his name to Abadam in 1851). His daughters, first Lucy and then Adah, inherited Middleton Hall. Adah’s son Major William John Hughes, my third (?) cousin and a great-great-great grandson of Edward Hamlin Adams, eventually owned the estate from around 1902. He sold the land, houses and farms over several years before and after the First World War. So the place belonged to the Abadam and Hughes families for almost 100 years.

Alice Abadam lived there from her birth in 1856 until she was about 30 years old. She documented her memories of Middleton Hall in the article below, published in 1939.

Nancy Jennings

After falling into disrepair, the main house burned down in 1931. The Middleton Hall estate, over 200 ha, is now the home of the National Botanic Garden of Wales. The history of the estate continues to be documented, including in the excellent 2022 book Middleton Hall, a History edited by Sarah Fox and published by the National Botanic Garden of Wales. In 2023 researchers recorded that a stone was found bearing the text “Edw. Abadam, Middleton Hall, Circus, 1855”. For more information about the estate and the Adams/Abadam family, see: Rees, L. A. (ed, 2023) The Middleman at Middleton Hall: the Letters of Thomas Herbert Cooke, Land Agent in Rebecca’s Carmarthenshire, 1841-1847, South Wales Record Society.