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Nearby, the Davenport House is reaching completion of curation of its enslaved quarters and others, such as the Andrew Lowe House, have begun to include enslaved people among the pantheon of figures highlighted in their historical narratives. The new curation has had a major impact in creating distance between Savannah’s historic district and the peddling of the mythic South. Guests can take guided tours or self-guided tours, both of which begin in the Orientation Gallery. Until the recent renovations, this area was the site’s gift shop; originally, however, it was the slave quarters.
Enslaved People Lived Here. These Museums Want You to Know. (Published 2019) - The New York Times
Enslaved People Lived Here. These Museums Want You to Know. (Published .
Posted: Wed, 26 Jun 2019 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Parterre Garden
The regal Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters is arguably the most popular tourist attraction in Savannah, Georgia. The National Historical Landmark sits on the north-east side of Oglethorpe Square, emanating quintessential appeal. The Wildflower Café on Telfair Square features a seasonal lunch menu and provides guests with a spectacular view of the square from the Jepson Center’s Eckburg Atrium. The Owens-Thomas House is considered by architectural historians to be one of the finest examples of English Regency architecture in America. Inspired by classical antiquity, this style of architecture takes its name from England's King George IV, who ruled as Prince Regent from 1811 to 1820.
Telfair Museums’ Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters: Telling the Untold Story
Before moving his family into their new home around 1833, Owens redecorated the interior and added three rooms to the second story at the back of the house. The family lived in their Savannah home during the winter months and spent summers in northern Georgia, New York, Philadelphia, or Europe. Owens, a Savannah native and an attorney, had been educated at Harrow and Cambridge University, England. Eventually, he became an alderman, then mayor of Savannah, then a Georgia state senator and state representative, and finally a United States congressman.
Visiting the Owens-Thomas House
The mayor of Savannah, George Welshman Owens, acquired the home in an auction for 10,000 dollars. The estate remained in the Owens family until 1951 when his granddaughter Margaret Gray Thomas passed away. Margaret Thomas did not have any direct heirs, so she willed the home to the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Owners, Residents, and Visitors
While there, explore the Jepson Center’s Architecture Audio Tour or Telfair Academy’s Architecture Audio Tour. Typically, open houses for listings of $10 million or more are either appointment-only or exclusively for other real estate agents, but the sheer number of mansions on the market in Southern California means that there are dozens open to the public every single weekend. At any given moment in Southern California, in markets hot and cold, hundreds of stellar estates are listed for sale. And each weekend, dozens of these houses open to the masses, letting potential buyers — or just people bored on a Sunday afternoon — experience the opulence that’s supposedly reserved for the ultra-rich. Unless you can flash a bank account with more zeroes than the GDP of a small country, you’ll never walk the halls of the 105,000-square-foot glass-and-marble fortress.
Art Start: Five Decades
The newly modified tour route will take visitors from the slave quarters into the main house, and then end their tours in the basement of the main house, where they will have the opportunity to view the original kitchen, laundry, bathing room, cistern, and cellar at their own pace. Interpretive staff will be on hand to answer questions on a variety of topics relevant to the house, including historic preservation, decorative arts, Lafayette’s visit, and urban slavery. In the 1990s, restoration work focused on conserving the Owens-Thomas House’s original slave quarters, which has brought national prominence to the museum as an important site for interpreting African-American history and culture in the South. Shipping merchant and enslaver Richard Richardson commissioned this house around 1816, and his family moved in upon its completion in 1819.
Our guide did the work to bridge the gap between the older interpretation of the house museum and the focus on enslavement established in the carriage house. The guide highlighted the unique features of the house, such as the formal dining room’s remarkable skylight, and discussed the homeowner’s place in elite social circles while also highlighting the stories left out of traditional historic home interpretation. Although tours may differ from guide to guide, ours seamlessly, and without apprehension or awkwardness, explained how enslavement and privilege shaped people’s experiences throughout the home. True to its house museum roots, the carriage house also features a domestic space, with original Haint-blue paint flaking off its ceiling joists and a dollhouse-sized replica of the building in its original configuration, offering depth and further meaning to the small rooms. Using Works Progress Administration (WPA) records, staff furnished the upstairs to represent enslaved people’s sleeping quarters. In addition to the furnishings, the curation team decided to include panels explaining how they utilized the WPA slave narratives to inform their restoration.
Museum
In the heart of Savannah’s celebrated Historic District, on the northeast quadrant of Oglethorpe Square, stands a grand old mansion, known today as the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters. An impressive two-story structure on a raised basement, it was completed in 1819 for Richard Richardson (1765–1833), an entrepreneur, shipping merchant, domestic slave trader, and bank president, and his wife, Frances Bolton Richardson. The architect was William Jay (c. 1792–1837), who also designed the Telfair family mansion on Barnard Street, which was renovated during the 1880s and is now the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences. Today, the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters is the best-preserved example of Jay’s work in Savannah, and one of the best English Regency-style homes in the country.
Telfair Children’s Art Museum (CAM) is Now Open!
The main facade itself is symmetrical in design, with paired windows, columns, and doors. Enslaved butlers managed not just the daily operations of upper-class homes, but also the enslaved staff that serviced them. In addition, enslaved butlers maintained the fine silver, china, and glassware used in entertaining. They would have stored valuable items in this space, which is complete with original cabinetry’s faux finishes, reproduced according to the results of paint analysis. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; the Baltimore Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
The large home, designed by English architect William Jay, is an excellent example of Regency architecture in the south. The style, influenced by the rule of King George IV, was appealing and coveted in the western world. King George IV, himself, was considered to be a man of impeccable taste with a keen eye for detail.
A comfortable spot in the front hall may have been used as a casual sitting area for reading or sewing. In hot weather, the French doors leading to a small balcony on the front facade were opened to allow any welcome breeze from an open window at the rear of the house to pass through. The windows operated on a pivot and could be opened and closed as needed to regulate the flow of air across the rear of the house. Adjacent to the family dining room is a butler’s pantry, used for serving the food that was carried up from the basement kitchen. The pantry had a stone sink for washing dishes and a fold-down wooden worktable. The room has floor-to-ceiling cabinets in which china and crystal were stored.
Three years after the house's completion, Richardson suffered financial losses and sold his house, which later came under possession of the Bank of the United States. For eight years, Mrs. Mary Maxwell ran an elegant lodging house in the structure. Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette was a guest of the city in 1825 and stayed at the home.
Explore over 200 years of art, history, and architecture in the heart of downtown Savannah. Tickets include unlimited admission to all three sites for one week from the date of purchase. In 1939 Margaret Thomas divided the entire second floor into two rental apartments, adding connecting doorways between several of the rooms and building an exterior iron stairway on the north side of the house. These non-structural changes did not significantly alter the original floor plan of the house.
The Telfair opened it as a traditional house museum, the Owens-Thomas House, in 1954. There are plenty of historic homes in Savannah, but the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters is special in that it tells the entire story of the people who lived there, specifically the enslaved people who built and worked in the home. Instead of focusing on the wealthy homeowners and addressing the enslaved people as an afterthought, the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters has made it their mission to fully share the home’s social history.
She returned to the Bay Area for her studies and worked as an artist and teacher. While there, Jackson attended Charles White’s drawing class at the Otis Art Institute. From 1968 to 1970, she opened and managed Gallery 32 in Los Angeles, which engaged a community of artist peers including David Hammons, Betye Saar, and Emory Douglas, among others. Over the course of her career, Jackson has developed an interdisciplinary practice as an artist, gallerist, dancer, educator, and stage designer and an equally expansive approach to process and medium.
There he won fame in the 1930s among the chorus of artistic voices around the Harlem Renaissance, alongside painter Aaron Douglas, sculptor Augusta Savage, and poet Langston Hughes. To assert the dignity and humanity of his fellow African Americans, Barthé crafted bronze statues of dancers, workers, religious figures, and icons in Black history like singer Josephine Baker, actor Paul Robeson, and Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. In works such as Feral Benga (1935) and Stevedore (1937), he boldly presented Black male bodies as strong and beautiful, challenging racial and gender taboos of the era. Today Barthé’s bronzes appear in many of America’s leading museum collections, and this exhibition provides a rare opportunity to admire two dozen of his most elegant and important creations. The relative anonymity of the people enslaved by the Owens family is typical, of course, for like most enslaved people throughout the South, they left no written record. This is, in part, due to an 1839 ordinance prohibiting anyone (black or white) from teaching free or enslaved people of color to read and write.
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