Telfair Museums has received a grant of $250,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue its ongoing preservation and new reinterpretation of the Owens-Thomas House, one of three Telfair Museum sites.  Telfair is one of only twelve museums nationwide to receive NEH funding this year.
 
A National Historic Landmark, the Owens-Thomas House tells the story of antebellum life in Savannah, taking visitors on a tour of a prominent Southern home and one of the oldest intact urban slave quarters in the South. Designed by British architectural prodigy William Jay and completed in 1819, the museum highlights one of the finest examples of English Regency architecture in the country—including period furnishings, a unique indoor bridge, a beautiful parterre garden, and plumbing technology ahead of its time. Tours of the site focus on the lives of and interactions between the most and least powerful people in the city of Savannah in the 1820s and 1830s, leading visitors to consider the complicated and intimate relationships that shaped the Southern slave based economy.
 
“This significant grant award from the NEH will help ensure that Owens-Thomas House will be appropriately preserved and enjoyed by residents and visitors to Savannah for decades to come,” said Lisa Grove, Telfair Museums Director/CEO. “Most importantly, we want to ensure that we accurately tell the stories of all people who lived there. The museum’s dedicated staff has spent years researching the lives of the enslaved men, women, and children who lived and worked in these spaces to tell a more complete history of the antebellum South and the early African American experience.”
 
For the past decade, restoration work has focused on conserving the interior of the Owens-Thomas House original slave quarters building, which has brought national prominence to the museum as an important site for interpreting African-American history and culture in the South.
 
The strategic focus now is reinterpreting the main house basement and slave quarters spaces. These intriguing and well-preserved spaces were the primary living and working quarters of the house’s enslaved servants and make the Owens-Thomas House unique among historic sites nationwide. The planned implementation work will include capital and historic preservation activities necessary to steward the buildings into their third century, as well as the creation of new educational exhibits designed to provide an expanded visit experience.
 
Key components of the upcoming implementation phase of the project include:
 
Reinterpreted Slave Quarters

The museum’s plan to reinterpret this space—recognized as one of the best preserved urban slave quarters in the South—will bring new awareness to this important piece of history. Visitor experience in the space will be enhanced through installations that draw upon the award-winning scholarship from the Slavery and Freedom in Savannah project and feature recorded excerpts of slave narratives that will give a representative voice to the people who inhabited the Owens-Thomas House Slave Quarters.     
 
New Education Gallery (Main House Basement)

This new education gallery will feature digital projections of enslaved workers, replica artifacts that can be touched and used, a discovery cabinet, a new exhibit devoted to “Slavery in Context,” a preservation/restoration exhibition, a General Lafayette documentary, and a voice panel with recorded readings of documents written by people associated with the Owens-Thomas House, among many other exhibits. This innovative gallery will give all visitors a richer, more tangible experience of the home and its history.
 
Orientation Gallery (Carriage House)

Telfair plans to convert the conserved Carriage House into a state-of-the-art Visitor Orientation Gallery where visitors will begin their tours.  This Orientation Gallery will introduce visitors to relevant themes and ideas that they will experience on their tour and will feature unique installations such as an interactive touchscreen map of historic Savannah, a series of family trees of the home’s former residents, and an immersive spiral column of the names of the 340-enslaved people owned by the Owens family.
 
Shannon Browning-Mullis, Telfair’s Curator of History and Decorative Arts adds, “we will never move beyond the problems facing our community and nation, like economic inequality, mass incarceration, and police brutality, until we understand the roots of inequality in America.  At the Owens-Thomas House, we hope an honest and specific investigation of the institution of slavery and the people who lived within it, both free and enslaved, will help us toward that understanding.”
 
Related Programs:
 
Lift Every Voice: Savannah’s African American History Museums’ Free Day
Sunday, August 20, 12-4pm
The Owens-Thomas House is joining institutions across the country to celebrate the opening year of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture with a special community event. At this event, we will be highlighting Savannah’s African American history and sharing details of the reinterpretation project with the public.
 
Conservation and Restoration at the Owens-Thomas House
Thursday, November 2, 5:30pm / Jepson Center
Free and open to the public
This lecture presents the Owens-Thomas House as an evolving example of historic preservation and the various approaches and treatments used in its material preservation throughout the home’s nearly 70 years as an historic house museum.  A reception sponsored by the Friends of the Owens-Thomas House will follow.
 
2019 Chatham County Public School System 8th Grade Program
Starting in 2019, every eighth-grader in the Savannah-Chatham Public School System will tour the new Owens-Thomas House exhibits as part of their core Georgia history standards, with a special focus on Savannah’s African American experience. Curriculum creation for the new eighth-grade tours is generously funded through a $15,000 grant by The Hodge Foundation, Inc. of Savannah.