The Owens–Thomas House & Slave Quarters (originally known as the Richardson House ) is a historic home in Savannah, Georgia , that is operated as a historic house museum by Telfair Museums . It is located at 124 Abercorn Street, on the northeast corner of Oglethorpe Square . The Owens–Thomas House was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976, as one of the nation's finest examples of English Regency architecture.
31-726: Renovations in the 1990s uncovered and restored one of the oldest and best preserved urban slave quarters in the American South . This most important and architecturally significant house was begun in 1816 and completed in 1819. Designed by the English architect William Jay of Bath , the house plans were drawn while Jay was still in England. He sent architectural elevations to local workers before his arrival in Savannah sometime after foundations were laid. According to Jay's letters,
62-676: A New Deal work-relief program, created an important photographic and documentary record of 485 slave houses. Current surveys of this historically significant building form include the Alabama Black Belt Slave Housing Survey ; the Virginia Slave House Project ; Joseph McGill's Sleeping With the Ancestors Project out of Charleston, South Carolina; and architect Jobie Hill's Slave Dwelling Database . Types of nails used,
93-483: A first floor with a laundry room and a kitchen, each with separate fires and chimneys, separated by a central stairway leading up to slave residences on the second floor. In other cases the upstairs living space was set above a carriage house or a shop . Many urban slave quarters were preserved after Emancipation because they served as still-useful servants' quarters, guest quarters, store rooms, etc. The Encyclopedia of Louisville (2014) described slave quarters in
124-482: A form of residential vernacular architecture constructed during the era of slavery in the United States . These outbuildings were the homes of the enslaved people attached to an American plantation, farm, or city property. Some former slave quarters were continuously occupied and used as personal residences until as late as the 1960s. Plantation slavery had regional variations dependent on which cash crop
155-602: A larger, centrally located community group. For example, at Thomas Jefferson 's Monticello , Mulberry Row was an area of the property where slave dwellings were built alongside a smokehouse , dairy , wash house , joinery , nailery / smithy , and a house where free stoneworkers lived during construction. After the stoneworkers left, the stoneworkers' house was used for textile production. Harriet Beecher Stowe quoted Rev. Westgate in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) about his impression of slave quarters, and he explained that construction materials depended on location and age of
186-566: A number of negroes on his plantations, all of whom were lodged in hovels, as is the custom in this country. Field cabins were isolated and somewhat remote but offered agricultural workers close proximity to crop fields. Few field cabins survive as they were generally "left to rot" after the last residents departed. Rural slave quarters were usually one or two-room cabins occupied by a family unit. The individual rooms were called pens ; houses were single-pen or double-pen . Some two-room cabins were duplexes hosting two families separated by
217-421: A plantation were provided with specific food rations and clothing allotments but these were typically inadequate, so the slave quarters were a place where preparations were made for hunting , trapping , and fishing , where chickens were kept, and where kitchen gardens were tended. In some cases, with an eye to time efficiency and maximizing profit, there was a central kitchen that provided all meals. Despite
248-490: A renovation of the carriage house in the 1990s, the owners of the site discovered one of the oldest and best preserved urban slave quarters in the American South. The history has been uncovered via their Slavery and Freedom Project , and via symposiums in 2008 and 2020 (planned). The ceiling of the slave quarters is painted haint blue , which was customarily used in Gullah culture to deter ghosts or other malevolent spirits. It
279-459: A system designed to preclude insurrection and protect the race-caste system that underpinned the municipal economy. Urban slave quarters ranged from in quality from sturdy masonry barracks to rickety wooden shacks. Observers of urban compounds in Wilmington, North Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina noted that the slave quarters were typically at the back of the property, adjacent to
310-516: A wall, each with their own entrance. Saddlebag plan houses had two units that were "separated by a central chimney". Dogtrot houses or open-passage houses had a breezeway between the two living spaces. Cabins with one room and a loft above were known as one up and one down . On average, slave quarters were log cabins with dirt floors, clay chimneys , wood-shingle roofs, and one unglazed window . Windows lacking glass would have been covered with shutters or curtains. Slave houses built in
341-417: A work yard, all surrounded by barrier walls. High walls were particularly common toward the rear property line and were likely intended to limit unsupervised entrance and egress by the enslaved. Urban slave quarters were often mixed-use blocks that combined residential space for the enslaved with laundries , privies , stables , and similar workspaces. In 19th century Charleston a typical arrangement would be
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#1732783437010372-847: Is notable as the largest swath of haint blue paint in North America. The restoration includes the pantry and other elements of the Gullah cooking, and the cellar where meals and laundry were prepared. The Owens–Thomas House collection contains furnishings and decorative arts from the English Regency period; containing effects of the Owens family, most pieces dating from the years 1790 to 1840. Collections include English Georgian and American Federal period furniture, early Savannah textiles, silver, Chinese Export porcelain, and 18th- and 19th-century art. The slave quarters feature slave artifacts of
403-697: The Isaac Royall House in Medford, Massachusetts , and at the Lott House in Brooklyn . Ruins of dwellings may exist at Oak Ridge Park in New Jersey. Former slave quarters are valuable resources for archaeologists studying daily life under slavery and expressions of cultural identity amongst the enslaved. The still-extant Historical American Buildings Survey , originally established as
434-651: The Marquis de Lafayette addressed the citizens of Savannah on his visit in 1825. William Jay was architect to other Savannah landmarks such as the Scarborough house, the Telfair House as mentioned above, and an attribution to the Gordon-Low House. A focus of tours of the site is the carriage house and the history of the enslaved workers who lived there, including the nanny, cook and butler. During
465-405: The task system , was less harsh and allowed the slaves more self-governance than the gang system did. The gang system allowed continuous work at the same pace throughout the day. The first gang, or "great gang," was given the hardest work, for the fittest slaves. The second gang was for less able slaves (teenagers, old people, or the unwell slaves) and this gang was given lighter work. The third gang
496-635: The 19th century were more likely to have plank floors and be raised on piers. Typical 19th-century quarters were around 200 square feet in area. Some slave dwellings in the United States were wood-frame or masonry buildings; slave quarters at two sites in South Carolina were found to have African-styled, clay-walled, wattle-and-daub construction that was common in the Caribbean slave housing but extremely rare in North America . Brick
527-850: The big house but subsidiary in size and quality of construction, and subject to surveillance, inspection and regulation. In some cases the slave owner lived off-site but an overseer's house was built near the slave quarters. Bedding was usually either straw on the floor or a straw-filled tick with a thin blanket. Bedframes were uncommon; where they existed, they were constructed with cord. Bureaus, tables, and chairs were uncommon. Possessions of cultural significance included homemade musical instruments such as drums and fiddles fashioned from dried gourds . Household goods in slave quarters were minimal but might have included work tools, iron cookware, pewter spoons, and locally made pottery ( colonoware ). The slave quarters often developed independent systems for food and cloth production. Enslaved adults on
558-448: The border-state city: "Generally, urban slaves' quarters were connected to their owners' property, usually in 'servant's rooms.' A typical newspaper ad from this period described a brick house for sale as having eleven rooms, two passages, a large kitchen, three servants' rooms, and a washhouse. Sometimes advertisements of this nature made it clear that the servants' rooms were in an outbuilding. In most cases, outbuildings were located behind
589-463: The decades and centuries essentially disappeared into the landscape even when they were not actively erased. As one reporter wrote upon visiting the ruins of Prospect Hill in Mississippi: "No one yet knows where the slaves are buried, their wooden markers long since having crumbled into dust." Lacking the self-limiting isolation of the plantation, urban slave quarters nonetheless existed within
620-525: The enslaved. As a rule, personal freedom for slaves was restricted to what could be achieved in the slave quarters from sundown to sunup. A traveler on the Mississippi in 1807 described the plantations in the vicinity of Point Coupee as having "Negro houses innumerable—being disposed almost contiguous to one another in a hurdle and adjacent to the manor house exhibit the view of small towns with their capitals." On some farms, slave houses were part of
651-420: The fact that marriages of enslaved people were generally illegal, slave quarters were the site of weddings and were the "cradle of the black family", as babies were born and families raised there. Many slave quarters also hosted burial grounds for the dead. Burials in slave cemeteries were often poorly marked even when in active use (carved stone grave markers would have been impossibly expensive), and over
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#1732783437010682-493: The house was to be aesthetically compatible to Bath. This is evident in the Bath stone of the house's construction as well as its sophisticated architectural detail. It was a gentrifying physical ornament to the newly successful Southern port. The Richardson House, as it was originally known—after its first owner and builder, Richard Richardson— is North America's preeminent example of period English Regency architecture. The mansion
713-658: The main house, on the alley. This is significant when coupled with the fact that most city lots, as evidenced by newspaper ads, were long and narrow. Thus, the white population was housed on the street side while their servants were relegated to the alley side of city lots." Slave quarters existed in northern states (in what would become the Union contra the southern Confederacy during the American Civil War ), but they were less common and few have been preserved. Surviving examples of " free state " slave quarters exist at
744-532: The nineteenth century and is characteristic of the ante-bellum period (c. 1820–1865). It is especially associated with cotton production in the Deep South, but also is associated with tobacco and sugar production. Rice plantations in Carolina, for example, never adopted a gang system of labor. The idea of a gang system is that enslaved workers would work all day (traditionally, from sunrise to sunset) under
775-481: The period. The courtyard features a small parterre garden that was redesigned in 1954 by Savannah landscape architect Clermont Huger Lee . Lee designed the formal garden in 1820 English-American style and supervised maintenance of garden for fourteen years. Slave quarters in the United States#Urban slave quarters Slave quarters in the United States , sometimes called slave cabins , were
806-423: The site: "On old plantations the negro quarters are of frame and clapboards, seldom affording a comfortable shelter from wind or rain; their size varies from eight by ten, to ten by twelve feet, and six or eight feet high; sometimes there is a hole cut for a window, but I never saw a sash, or glass, in any. In the new country, and in the woods, the quarters are generally built of logs, of similar dimensions." He had
837-452: The thickness of any surviving glass, and the techniques used to saw lumber are used to date antebellum structures that may have been slave quarters. There is significant variation in how historic sites interpret former slave quarters for visitors. Gang system The gang system is a system of division of labor within slavery on a plantation . It is the more brutal of two main types of labor systems. The other form, known as
868-466: Was an uncommon building material, but some slave quarters were constructed from field stone; for example, local limestone was used in Maryland . Contemporary documentarians report that former slave houses often have low ceilings, little natural light, and feel "stuffy". The home of the slave owner on the plantation or farm was typically called the big house . Slave quarters were usually located near
899-483: Was given the easiest work. As an example, the planting gang in the McDuffie plantation was split into three classes (as quoted by Metzer): The first class had to go ahead and create small holes with about 18 to 25 cm (7 to 10 in) distance to each other. The second class then dropped cotton seeds in these holes and the 3rd class covered the holes with dirt. In the United States, the gang system developed in
930-468: Was grown, most commonly cotton , hemp , indigo , rice , sugar , or tobacco . Sugar work was exceptionally dangerous—the sugar district of Louisiana was the only region of the United States that saw consistent population declines, despite constant imports of new slaves. The cotton plantations used the grueling gang system . Some plantations used the task system , which permitted slightly more leisure time and thus development of domestic life amongst
961-558: Was purchased in 1830 by local attorney and politician George Welshman Owens for $ 10,000 (~$ 320,919 in 2023). The family maintained it for several decades until Owens' granddaughter, Margaret Thomas, bequeathed the house to the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences (established in 1885) as the South's oldest art museum, in 1951. The house is notable for its early cast iron side veranda with elaborate acanthus scroll supports on which