A Tour of America’s Slave Houses Leads to Medford
To help further contextualize America’s sordid past of slavery, Joseph McGill, Jr. has taken a decidedly unique approach: He finds, travels to, and sleeps in buildings around the country that housed enslaved Africans centuries ago.
The founder of The Slave Dwelling Project started the initiative four years ago in his native South Carolina, a state that is no stranger to slavery. Since then, he’s made it his personal mission to raise awareness of the ancient structures and their inhabitants, which many times don’t get their proper historical recognition.
The annual program, which runs from March through November, has brought McGill to dozens of slave houses and living quarters across the country.
“We as a nation tend to preserve buildings, usually iconic buildings that are associated with heroes of that period; usually white males who were often times slave owners,’’ McGill told Boston.com. “We tend not to want to preserve the slave dwellings associated with those buildings.’’
McGill’s tour of sorts — a pilgrimage, if you will — most recently landed him at the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford for a two-night stay at the only remaining freestanding eighteenth-century slave quarters building in the North. The property on George Street includes a mansion and slave houses located on what was once a 500-acre estate.
The site — named for Isaac Royall, Sr., who bought the property in 1732 — is found in a part of the country where the average amateur historian studying slavery in America might not think to look, McGill said.
“The Medford location is important because most slave houses are in southern states,’’ said McGill. “It’s equally important to stay in those northern states that once in their history did have slavery within their boundaries.’’
Joseph McGill, Jr.
Medford wasn’t his only stop in New England. McGill, who spends his time outside of the project working in South Carolina as a history consultant, also recently visited the Bush-Holley House in Greenwich, Conn. But the majority of the slave houses he has stayed at sit in the heart of the south.
“I get the most interesting reactions when [people] find out I’ve been in northern states because the thought process is that slavery was only in the south,’’ McGill remarked.
The former program officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation began his stay in Medford on Friday night. Part of his time in the area included speaking at Tufts University to a group of students, nine of which joined him at Royall House to share McGill’s overnight experience there.
Elizabeth Ammons, the Harriet H. Fay professor of literature at Tufts, invited McGill to speak to her students. “[The students] will be able to experience the house like how it was in the 18th century. They will be able to have a conversation with McGill, and he will be able to tell them more on what it was like for the slaves,’’ Professor Ammons told The Tufts Daily.
While he made the most of his stay in Medford, McGill said he still hasn’t matched the intense emotions he experienced at a plantation in Texas where he stood on an actual slave auction block. “I have not yet come across a moment in this project that equals or surpasses that,’’ he said.
When asked which slave house he’d like to visit next, McGill responded tongue-in-cheek that he has his eyes set on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Northwest Washington, D.C.
“I’d love to spend the night in the White House,’’ he said, noting that several sitting presidents were slave owners who brought their slaves with them to the nation’s capital upon being elected.
He said he even reached out to Michelle Obama because he visited at a plantation in South Carolina where the First Lady’s great-great-grandfather once lived as a slave. McGill said he’s still waiting to hear back from her, though.
Instead, he is off to Boone Hall Plantation in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, where he plans to continue his mission.
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