Welcome to the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters. As you make your way around the property today, you’ll explore the lives of the free and enslaved people who lived and worked here. Our story focuses primarily on the 1820s and 1830s, when Savannah’s population numbered around 7,000 people, including wealthy white residents, working-class white residents, and enslaved and free people of color.

Shipping merchant Richard Richardson commissioned this house around 1816, and his family moved in upon its completion in 1819. The family only lived in the home for a few years before the combination of a major fire in the city, a yellow fever epidemic, and several deaths in his family forced Richardson to relocate to Louisiana and sell the property. For six years after the Richardsons’ departure, Mary Maxwell, a widowed entrepreneur, operated an upscale boarding house on the site. In 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette, the famous American Revolutionary War general, stayed in the boarding house during his visit to Savannah. In 1830, lawyer and landholder George Welshman Owens purchased this home for his family’s primary residence. He lived here with his wife, Sarah, and their six children. George and Sarah Owenses’ granddaughter Margaret Gray Thomas bequeathed the property to the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences, now known as Telfair Museums, upon her death in 1951. It opened to the public as a museum in 1954.

As you can see on this timeline, census records indicate that often more enslaved people lived on this property than the numbers of individuals in the Richardson and Owens families. Today, tours at the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters tell the story of the relationships between the wealthy white families that lived in this home and the individuals of African descent whom they enslaved. Most of this information is derived from letters and documents written by the Owenses and their peers, so it is inherently biased. Research on these families and the individuals they enslaved is ongoing.

This Orientation Gallery is located in the original carriage house. It had space for horses and carriages on the first floor and a hayloft on the second. Your next listening station is in this room at the Wall of Names.