Royall House & Slave Quarters

Take a guided tour this summer of the Royall House and Slave Quarters, the site of a former northern plantation. Though only two acres today, this property was once over five hundred acres and the residence of the Royall family, the largest slaveholding family in Massachusetts history. Throughout their nearly forty-year tenure in Medford from 1737 to 1775, the Royalls enslaved some sixty people, women, men, and children, whose bondage made the family’s luxurious lifestyle possible. As one of the only remaining freestanding quarters where enslaved people lived and labored in the North, the museum bears witness to the intertwined stories of wealth and bondage in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts and to the resistance and political and legal activism of enslaved and free Black people in the eighteenth century. The museum’s tours focus on the lives and experiences of the enslaved people who once lived on this property.

By taking patrons through the first floor of the Slave Quarters and the first two floors of the Royalls’ mansion, guests will learn more about the history of northern slavery and its influence on the northern colonies. There are only 20 tickets per each event (2nd July 16. 2025).

If your register and find out later that you cannot attend, please give enough notice, so that we may take a potential attendee off of our waitlist.

PLEASE NOTE: The first floors of the Slave Quarters and Royall House are wheelchair and walker accessible. However, there are only stairs up to the second floor of the mansion.