The Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters

The Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters sits off Oglethorpe Square in Savannah, Georgia, about a half-mile from River Street, the famously cobbled street teeming with tourists. It is part of the Telfair Museums group, which includes the Telfair Academy and the Jepson Center. The house and its outbuildings were constructed by enslaved laborers in 1819 for merchant Richard Richardson. After the house changed hands several times in the 1820s, in 1830 attorney and politician George Welshman Owens purchased the home. The property remained in the Owens family until Margaret Gray Thomas, a granddaughter of George Owens, donated it to the Telfair Museums upon her death in 1951. The Telfair opened it as a traditional house museum, the Owens-Thomas House, in 1954.

Today, the property is called the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters. The new name reflects the 2018 restoration and re-curation of the property’s slave quarters, a part of the Telfair Museum’s larger Slavery and Freedom in Savannah Project, which produced the 2014 edited volume, Slavery and Freedom in Savannah.¹ The change, led by curator Shannon Browning-Mullis, began developing in the 1990s but was finally brought to fruition through generous support from a $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities Grant. Additional contributions from the Hodge Foundation, the City of Savannah, the Georgia Foundation for the Arts, and local donors brought total fundraising to one million dollars.² This funding afforded Browning-Mullis and her team the opportunity to engage visitors in “honest exploration” of urban slavery and the way it informed “social, domestic, and economic relationships” in the region and its legacy today.³

Since its opening in 2018, the NEH-sponsored restoration and re-curation defines guests’ experiences of the entire site. In contrast to its traditional house-museum roots, with focus on wallpaper and elite lives, the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters now offers discussion on the house and all its inhabitants: enslaver and enslaved. This change is not only a significant shift for the site but marks the beginning of a larger shift at historical sites across the city, one that finally includes Savannah in the conversation about interpreting slavery at sites of enslavement that began in the late 1980s and 90s.

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. Now, signage in the space encourages visitors to “explore the complicated relationships of the antebellum South” and establishes that the immense wealth displayed in the house would have been impossible without the hundreds of people enslaved and trafficked by the Owens and Richardson families.

The small room is packed with information, and guests are given a moment to take it in before the guide begins their introduction. On one wall, beneath an abridged timeline of Savannah’s history, is an additional timeline of the property’s inhabitants, divided by race, gender, and emancipation status. Further signage explains the meaning of the site’s important semantic decision to discuss “enslaved persons” rather than use the dehumanizing term “slave.”

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. Unlike older house museums that are curated to appear as if “the General just stepped out,” as they say at Mount Vernon, the newest portion of this site recognizes that the interior design has been re-created, engaging guests in the intellectual processes of curation and conservation.

The tour exits the carriage house and walks through the gardens to the rear of the main house, where guests are met by a space curated with more traditional twentieth-century house-museum practices. 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.

For example, in the children’s bedroom, our guide used the enslaved person’s bedroll tucked under the bed to discuss how status shaped people’s rest. When discussing the house’s indoor plumbing system, a first for the region, the guide noted that without professional plumbers in Savannah, enslaved workers learned to operate and maintain the system. While in the library, the tour guide remarked that men of the Owens family were outspoken Fire-Eaters in the antebellum period who defended post–1808 human traffickers in their careers as lawyers and politicians.⁴

The last stop, the basement level, another part of the 2018 update, is largely curated as a protected ruin; signage notes “conservation” rather than “restoration.” Like the carriage house, curators have elected to use this space to support the site’s modern narrative of enslavement and privilege with interpretive signage. On large panels, guests read letters from the Owens family that illustrate their participation in the cruelty of slavery. In a nod to more contemporary times, one panel focuses on the power behind “family separation” during enslavement and alludes to contemporary practices on the US–Mexico border. These primary sources both welcome guests into the world of museum curation and function as work cited pages for the guides’ tours.

Since its 2018 re-curation, the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters has stood out among Savannah’s house museums and set an example for others to restore and interpret the domestic spaces of the enslaved. 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. This site tells the tough stuff of American history in a refreshing fashion. The new curation has had a major impact in creating distance between Savannah’s historic district and the peddling of the mythic South.