Tufts Senior Connection Royall House Visit

Location: 15 George Street Medford, MA

Date: September 21, 2024

Time: 10:00 am to 2:00 pm

Sponsor: Tufts Senior Connection

Cost: $35 per person

Join the Tufts Senior Connection on a private guided tour of the Royall mansion, slave quarters, and grounds. Travel a mile from the Tufts campus and travel back three centuries to another world. Lunch to follow at 80 George Street. 

In 1739, the Royall family was the largest slaveholding family in Massachusetts. At age 20, young Isaac Royall inherited his father’s Medford estate, home to 60 enslaved men, women, and children. Royall made his fortune from his sugar plantation, real estate, slave ownership and slave trading. At the breakout of the War for Independence, he sailed to Nova Scotia and thence to England. 

Today, the Royall House and Slave Quarters, one of the only remaining structures in the North where enslaved people lived and worked, shares a living history of their lives, and their stories of wealth and bondage living side by side in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts.