The place called Lumpkin's Slave Jail was indeed a jail, but it was much more than that. It was a holding pen for human chattel. In Richmond's Shockoe Bottom river district, the notorious slave trader Robert Lumpkin ran the city's largest slave-holding facility in the 1840s and 1850s. Tens of thousands of blacks were held in the cramped brick building while they waited to be sold. Read More … [Read more...]

With young black men used as bait, dogs were trained to track and pursue runaway slaves in the cobblestone courtyard of a Richmond slave jail. Hidden for more than a century, the courtyard of round, gray stones and other remnants of Lumpkin's Slave Jail lay exposed yesterday in the corner of a Shockoe Bottom parking lot. Read More … [Read more...]