MEDFORD — On a small piece of land a few blocks off I-93 stand two buildings, both made of clapboard and brick.
One is an 18th-century mansion known as the Royall House, once home to the largest holder of enslaved people in Colonial Massachusetts. The other, a modest structure a few yards away, is believed to be the only remaining slave quarters in the Northern United States. At least 60 enslaved people lived here for years, working in the opulent mansion and on the more than 500 acres known as Ten Hills Farm.
Isaac Royall Jr. lived on the sprawling estate with his wife and children before fleeing to Nova Scotia on the eve of the Revolutionary War. He later set himself up in London and asked a friend to sell some of the enslaved people he counted as property. Royall left part of his fortune to Harvard, which led to the establishment of the Royall Chair, the school’s first endowed law professorship. His family crest was used as an element of the Harvard Law School seal until 2016, when it was finally abandoned amid protests by students and faculty.
The African and Afro-Caribbean people whom Royall and his father enslaved are less well-known. The names they were given have been carefully gathered over the centuries, found in wills and account books and inventories. Nan. Ruth. House Peter. Cuffee. Perhaps the best-known is Belinda Sutton. In his will, Royall offered the woman, identified only as Belinda, the choice to remain enslaved or to have her freedom. Not surprisingly, she chose freedom. Two years later, in 1783, she petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for a pension from the Royall estate and it was granted. But she only received a portion of the settlement, so she petitioned five more times over the next decade, her name then listed as Belinda Sutton, seeking what was due.
Taken together, the two small buildings in Medford, now a museum, tell a foundational story of this country, of immense wealth underpinned by a brutal system of slavery. But they also bear witness to a vital effort to honor those who were enslaved here and to connect their history to the calls for racial justice galvanizing the nation today.
If that sounds like an enormous mission for an organization that has only one half-time employee on the payroll, it is. But Kyera Singleton, 31, who in April became the executive director of the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, doesn’t see that as a problem, any more than she sees the museum’s temporary closure during the COVID-19 pandemic as insurmountable.