Royall House to Host Family & Slavery Talk March 16

On Wednesday, March 16, 2016, at 7:30 p.m., historian Rachel May, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Michigan University, will give a pre-publication talk on her book, Stitches in Time: Family and Slavery in Mercantile America.

In 1917, a trunk that had remained closed for nearly a century was opened to reveal a treasure trove of family clothes, hundreds of letters, account books, a medical diary, and three quilt tops whose paper backings are dated as early as 1798 and reference rum, “shuger,” and the West Indies — critical elements, of course, of the slave trade.

The Crouch family were not slave traders, but like most 19th-century merchant families, they were implicated in the trade and lived between North and South, traveling up and down the coast to visit one another and sending goods for both business and personal use — cotton, lumber, apples, jam, and cloth.

Stitches in Time tells the story of the Crouches and the people they enslaved — Boston, Minerva, George, and Jenny, to name a few — through the lens of the quilt tops, from the 1830s to the late 1860s, chronicling local and national events, in Charleston, South Carolina, and Providence, Rhode Island.

The event will be held at the Royall House and Slave Quarters at 15 George Street, Medford, and is free to Royall House and Slave Quarters members. General admission is $5. 

On-street parking is available, and the museum is located on the 96 and 101 MBTA bus routes. Please email director@RoyallHouse.org for more information or visit RoyallHouse.org. Find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

About the author: Rachel May is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches nonfiction. Her first book, Quilting with a Modern Slant, was named a Best Book of 2014 by Library Journal and Amazon.com. Her novel The Benedictines has just been published.  She holds a PhD in English Literature & Cultural Studies from The University of Rhode Island and an MFA from The University of Montana.

About the museum: In the eighteenth century, the Royall House and Slave Quarters was home to the largest slaveholding family in Massachusetts and the enslaved Africans who made their lavish way of life possible. Architecture, household items, and archaeological artifacts bear witness to the intertwined stories of wealth and bondage, set against the backdrop of America’s quest for independence. The Slave Quarters is the only remaining such structure in the northern United States, and the Royall House is among the finest colonial-era buildings in New England.

– Submitted by Royall House Executive Director Tom Lincoln