The Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters allows visitors to explore the complicated relationships between the most and least powerful people in the city of Savannah in the early 19th century. Our tours focus on the art, architecture, and history of the home through the lens of slavery.

Visitors to the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters are guided through one of the finest examples of Regency architecture in America as well as the original slave quarters designed to house the enslaved men, women and children who maintained it.

During the early 19th century, the great majority of enslaved people in the Lowcountry lived on plantations, toiling in agriculture, which included the cultivation of staple crops such as cotton and rice. Their lives, focused on the seasons, consisted of hard, manual labor often done under the blazing sun in humid conditions.

[Savannah River plantations. Savannah: Georgia Historical Society, 1947] Hamilton Plantation Located on St. Simons Island, the remains of this antebellum plantation contain two surviving slave cabins, originally a set of four built before 1833.

Q.K. Philander Doesticks, What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation: Great Auction Sale of Slaves at Savannah, GA, 1863. The race track is long gone, but you can find a Historic Marker commemorating the event 1/4th of a mile from where the sale took place.