Telfair Museums

The Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters. It is the one visit that is unlike anything else on the trip: an 1819 William Jay house where the tour includes the quarters of the five to fourteen people the household enslaved, with the original blue-washed ceilings surviving in those rooms. Reserve a time online up to four weeks ahead; visits hold 12 people, leave every 15 minutes and last 45 to 60 minutes.

American and European art of the 19th and 20th centuries in the neoclassical mansion William Jay completed around 1820 for Alexander Telfair, with the rotunda and sculpture galleries added in the 1880s. The strength is American Impressionism and the Ashcan School: Childe Hassam, Frederick Frieseke, George Bellows and Robert Henri, much of it assembled while the painter Gari Melchers advised the museum from 1906 to 1916. The Bird Girl statue from the cover of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" is on view here.

Yes. It holds the Telfair Children's Art Museum, which opened in July 2023 and is included in regular admission, alongside the contemporary exhibitions in Moshe Safdie's 2006 building and a long-term installation of the museum's modern and contemporary collection from 1945 to the present. Children 6 to 12 pay $10 on the pass and under-6s are free.

One pass covers all three sites for seven days: $30 adults, $27 seniors 65 and over and active military, $20 students 13 to 25 with ID, $10 children 6 to 12, free under 6. All three open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and close on Monday; holiday exceptions are posted on the museum's hours page.

Reserve it. Visits are guided, hold up to 12 people, leave every 15 minutes and last 45 to 60 minutes, and you can select a day and time online up to four weeks ahead as space permits. Everyone checks in at the ticket booth on arrival. There is no single-site ticket; the three-site pass is the admission.

Richard Richardson, the shipping merchant and enslaver who had it built in 1819, first. By March 1825 it was Mrs. Maxwell's boarding house, and the Marquis de Lafayette stayed there on his visit to Savannah. George Welshman Owens bought it at auction for $10,000 in 1830 and lived there with his wife Sarah, six children and up to fourteen enslaved people; he was mayor in 1832, served in Congress from 1835 to 1839, and enslaved more than 400 people across his properties. His granddaughter Margaret Gray Thomas left the house to the Telfair on her death in 1951. Of the enslaved household, four people are known by name: Fanny, who was nine, Diana the cook, Peter the butler, and Emma.

In the Telfair Academy at 121 Barnard Street. Sylvia Shaw Judson modeled it in clay in 1936 and it was cast six times, once in lead and five times in bronze. The bronze that stood in the Trosdal family plot at Bonaventure Cemetery from about 1940 became the cover of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" through Jack Leigh's photograph, and Telfair removed it from the cemetery for safekeeping in 1997. It has been on loan to the museum since, shown at both the Academy and the Jepson Center in that time, so ask at the desk on the day.

That is Telfair's own claim, and its pages phrase it several ways: the oldest public art museum in the South, and the first museum in the United States founded by a woman. The dates behind it are firm. Mary Telfair's 1875 will left the family mansion to the Georgia Historical Society to be opened as a public art museum, and it opened in 1886 as the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences. The name Telfair Museums, covering all three sites, dates from 2009.

The Owens-Thomas visit is a fixed 45 to 60 minutes at your reserved time. The Academy and the Jepson are self-paced. The pass lasts seven days, so the plan that works is Owens-Thomas and one art museum in one afternoon, and the third building later in the week. Do not try all three in a row.

Partly. The main house keeps its original stairs and has no elevator. The orientation gallery, in the original carriage house, and the slave quarters have ramped entrances. Ask at the ticket booth what the route can include before the tour begins.

The Robinson garage is next to the Jepson Center and the Telfair Academy, and the State Street garage is across Oglethorpe Square from the Owens-Thomas House; there is metered street parking near all three. The city sets the garage and meter rates, and this site's parking guide keeps the current figures.