Formal dining room, Owens-Thomas House; house for sale, Abercorn Street.
The first owner of what is now the Owens-Thomas House was Richard Richardson. Richardson made his fortune trading cotton, rice, sugar, and slaves, and was also an attorney, real estate man, and banker. The Panic of 1819 occurred two years after the home’s completion, bankrupting Richardson. This period also brought the Great Savannah Fire, in which Richardson lost a great deal of real estate investments, and a yellow fever epidemic, which carried away his wife and two of his children. The home went into foreclosure, and Richardson moved to New Orleans and never returned.
A section of the home’s carriage house served as the slave quarters. Exposed ceiling beams are still painted “haint blue” by the slaves themselves, as protection from evil spirits. Evil spirits, it seems, cannot cross water. Or blue paint.
The house itself had walls painted Kermit green and salmon pink, but none of the walls were blue.
Things I like...
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Robert Adams, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968. Thank you, luzfosca.
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“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on...”
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The Flag
-by Thomas Cooper Gotch (1910)
This is one of my favourite...
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Edgar Degas, Le viol detail la domestique (1869)
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Alfred Henry Maurer, The Peacock (Portrait of a Woman), 1903
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