Hi, I'm Holly Frey.
And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
And we are visiting Medford, Massachusetts today, and specifically the Royall House and
Slave Quarters.
This is a wonderful and unique home museum, it is a home people used to live in and there
are also slave quarters that still exits where enslaved people lived on the property.
We could tell you about it but we have experts so we're going to go talk to them and get
the whole scoop.
My name is Penny Outlaw and I'm co-president of the Royall House and Slave Quarters.
The Royall House and Slave Quarters was purchased in 1737 and it was only a 4 room brick cottage,
two rooms on the 1st floor and 2 rooms on the 2nd floor.
It was purchased by Isaac Royall, Sr. who had made his money in the slave trade and
was living on a plantation in Antigua, in the Caribbean, and he wanted to come back
to Massachusetts where he was from.
And significant work was done to probably quadruple the size of the house and make it
into a colonial Georgian mansion, ready for Isaac Royall, Sr. and his family's arrival
in 1737.
He decided that he wanted to come home probably late 1720s, early 1730s.
We don't know what prompted this decision.
We do know that there were some slave revolts in the Caribbean at the time and they were
really well publicized, but we don't know that that was specifically the reason that
he decided to return to Massachusetts.
Isaac Royall, Sr. was a very active participant in what has become known as the triangle slave
trade, and that was the trade that was existing starting in Africa, where the British, the
Portuguese, the Spanish, the French were capturing and enslaving Africans,
forcing them onto ships.
This is off the coast of Western Africa.
They were then enduring what became known as the middle passage, so a trip from Africa,
mostly at this point in time, they were going to the Caribbean, because they were growing
sugarcane in the Caribbean.
So those were 2 points in the triangle, and the third point would be
some point in North America.
And it's many points in North America.
As far as this property is concerned, the key point Medford is a very important place
in that trade because Medford was the center of rum making in the colonies.
Cane is being made into molasses and being shipped to specifically Medford, Massachusetts
barrels of molasses to be distilled into rum.
Slavery was very common in the north.
People were well aware of it.
If you looked at newspaper advertisements people were advertising to buy and sell people
in pretty much every paper.
Children are being bought and sold, in some cases babies are being given away.
The Royalls lived very differently than the enslaved people.
The Royalls were people of leasure, they were at the top of the society in terms of wealth.
So they would have done almost nothing, in terms of physical activity and they would
have done no work, literally.
Everything was done for them.
So their typical day they would most likely be entertaining, they could have visitors
from England who would come and stay a year.
They would have visitors, other very wealthy people who would come to visit for a week
or so.
So their day would be spent chatting and playing cards and sitting by the window reading.
And you'll notice that the house has window seats in almost every room for that purpose.
But they would be waiting for various meals to be served.
By contrast, the enslaved people would be doing all of the work for, what you could
look at as a small boutique hotel, between the Royall family and all of their visitors.
So they would be making all of the meals, they would be doing all of the cleaning, they
would be making candles, things that we don't think about now.
But candles were your light source, and you would need hundreds of candles weekly for
lights, because if you ran out of candles, you ran out of light.
They would be grinding wheat for flour.
They would be doing all the cyclical cooking things to put things away in root cellars
and to salt meat and put that away for the winter.
Because you're going to have 7 or 8 months in New England where you're not harvesting
anything and what you have to eat is what you put away.
They would do all the cleaning, any drawing of baths, they would keep all the fires going
in all the rooms during the cool season, which really starts in October and ends,
you know late May.
This room that we're in is called the kitchen chamber.
And on that same inventory that was done in 1739 when Isaac Royall Sr. died, there was
an inventory done for probate purposes, and it listed everything in every room and it's
market value, and on that inventory this is called the kitchen chamber, so that's the
room that we're standing in now.
Notice its contrast with the room that we were just in which was called the 'marble
chamber' which was the master bedroom.
Clearly it's a work room, we have interpreted this room back to the way it was in 1739.
So what we think is that enslaved Africans slept in this room, even though it was a work
room, because they were working mostly all of the time and you really slept when and
where you could.
You did not have a room of your own, or even a room of your own to share.
The Royall family, their level of wealth, it would have taken a certain number of people
to provide the service that they wanted.
So a certain number of people to do the cooking, to tend the fires, to make the candles, to
chop the wood, to do all the things to keep the house and the Royalls going.
When people come to the Royall House, if they don't remember anything else, I'd like them
to remember the disparity in the two sets of lives that were lived here.
And remember what close proximity both populations were in with the slave quarters being about
50 ft. from the mansion.
So you have 2 different populations living incredibly close together, but being at absolute
opposite ends of the spectrum.
Many many thanks to the Royall House and Slave Quarters and particularly Penny who was our
guide through this piece of history.
And to Gracelaw Simmons who works there and arranged a lot of the day's events for us.
Yeah, I was really glad to be able to learn the story, not just of who lived on this property,
but how that also connected to other lives in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the world.
Yeah, it really give us a strong sense of the fact that slavery if a global issue and
has been historically.
So again, many, many thanks to Royall House.
And thank you again to Penny and Gracelaw.
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