Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North

14 Luxury on the Grandest Scale

Luxury on the Grandest Scale Up at Ten Hills Farm in the mid-1700s, Isaac Royall Jr. lost no time cementing his position and ensuring that his legacy would last.While Penne and her husband Henry Vassall established themselves at 94 Brattle Street in Cambridge (enjoying their extensive gardens and a view that stretched one thousand feet to the Charles River), and Ann and Robert Oliver began the construction of a grand mansion several miles to the south in Dorchester, Isaac Jr. and his family continued with the transformation of the house and grounds in Medford. For all three siblings, it was a time for luxury on the grandest scale. Soon it was a time of many christenings as well; for though the Master lived only to see his stepdaughter give birth to Thomas in Antigua, his widow, Elizabeth Royall, would be a grandmother time and time again. And each of her three children , Ann, Isaac, and Penelope, would name a child after her, or more than one, if that first infant died. Penelope gave birth in her first year of marriage. Her Elizabeth was born just before Christmas.A second daughter, Penelope, came one year later but did not live. In Medford, meanwhile, Isaac’s Elizabeth was joined by a second daughter, Mary, who was born in January 1744. Three years later, Isaac Jr. buried his firstborn (the wobbly-kneed infant from the Feke painting) and welcomed a new baby (a second Elizabeth) with a christening at Christ Church Boston where he kept a pew. 14 184 CHAPTER 14 These two children, Mary and Elizabeth, would survive into adulthood, making the Royalls a family of four. Penne’s Elizabeth thrived as well, making the Vassalls a family of three. Ann and Robert Oliver produced more cousins still. As Thomas turned four, the infants Isaac, Elizabeth, and Richard Oliver followed in succession , wailing their first in the clear air of Dorchester not far from the sea. The network and the binding grew. Isaac Royall Jr. was busy in that time. A new father with grand expectations of success, he was not satisfied with the mansion at Ten Hills Farm alone and ordered an elegant residence built on what once had been King Philip’s land beside the sea in Bristol, Rhode Island. Known then and now as Mount Hope Farm, today this fragment of Elizabeth Royall’s vast inheritance is operated as a bed-and-breakfast (named “editor’s choice” by Yankee Magazine in 2008), and touted as a “perfect location for weddings, corporate events, retreats, strategic planning sessions, seminars, reunions, rehearsal dinners and outings . . . [with] a multitude of spectacular settings for your special day.” There, where once a powerful sachem planned a war and met his death, guests can rest in the “Isaac Royall Library,” an elegant wood-paneled room on the first floor, before retiring upstairs to the DeWolfe chamber, named after Captain James DeWolfe, a leading Rhode Island slave-trader. The Royall history regarding slavery is never mentioned on the inn’s website. The DeWolfes do not get off so easily. The source of their great fortune is noted, if briefly. But there is plenty more not pretty enough to fit on any brochure that hopes to lure new customers. Captain James DeWolfe, after whom that upstairs bedroom is named, was charged with murder once for binding and gagging an ailing slave aboard his ship, the Polly, lashing her to a chair, then heaving the seat and its terrified occupant over the gunwale and into the sea to her death. A Caribbean court would dismiss the case and accept the captain’s explanation that this was a mercy killing done for the health of other slaves and crew, since she was ill. Charges were dismissed. But there must be something else. For at a time when such heinous acts were not altogether uncommon, almost all the Polly’s crew refused to execute the captain ’s orders. Thus the charges. Thus the trial. LUXURY ON THE GRANDEST SCALE 185 For the Royall and Vassall families at that time business in New England and Antigua proved consuming. This was not the heyday the Master had experienced. Yet Isaac Jr. and his brother-in-law did the best they could. Together they expanded the Royalls’ estate outside St. John’s by leasing an adjoining property from Ann and Robert Oliver, their neighbors in both Antigua and Massachusetts, their...