Excavation site Archaeologists excavated the jail had to cope with groundwater that filled trenches as fast as they were dug.

C. David M Doody / Courtesy Richmond City Council Slave Trail Commission

Digging up the Past at a Richmond Jail

The excavation of a notorious jail recalls Virginia's leading role in the slave trade

  • By Abigail Tucker
  • Smithsonian magazine, March 2009

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    Robert Lumpkins slave jail

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    Archaeologists knew that Robert Lumpkin's slave jail stood in one of the lowest parts of Richmond, Virginia—a sunken spot known as Shockoe Bottom. From the 1830s to the Civil War, when Richmond was the largest American slave-trading hub outside of New Orleans, "the devil's half acre," as Lumpkin's complex was called, sat amid a swampy cluster of tobacco warehouses, gallows and African-American cemeteries. This winter, after five months of digging, researchers uncovered the foundation of the two-and-a-half-story brick building where hundreds of people were confined and tortured. Buried under nearly 14 feet of earth, the city's most notorious slave jail was down a hill some eight feet below the rest of Lumpkin's complex—the lowest of the low.

    "People inside would have felt hemmed in, trapped," says Matthew Laird, whose firm, the James River Institute for Archaeology Inc., uncovered the 80- by 160-foot plot. On a wet December day, the site was a deep, raw pit pocked with mud puddles, with an old brick retaining wall that divided the bottom—which soaked workers were struggling to pump dry—into two distinct tiers.

    A century and a half ago, there would have been plenty of traffic back and forth between the upper level of the complex, where the master lived and entertained guests, and the lower, where slaves waited to be sold. Lumpkin, a "bully trader" known as a man with a flair for cruelty, fathered five children with a black woman named Mary, who was a former slave and who eventually acted as his wife and took his name. Mary had at least some contact with the unfortunates her husband kept in chains, on one occasion smuggling a hymnal into the prison for an escaped slave named Anthony Burns.

    "Imagine the pressure that was applied, and what she had to live through," says Delores McQuinn, chairwoman of Richmond's Slave Trail Commission, which promotes awareness of the city's antebellum past and sponsored much of the dig.

    Though Lumpkin's jail stood only three blocks from where the state capitol building is today, except for local history buffs "no one had a clue that this was here," McQuinn says. Razed in the 1870s or '80s, the jail and Lumpkin's other buildings were long buried beneath a parking lot for university students, part of it lost forever under a roaring strip of Interstate 95. Preservation efforts didn't coalesce until 2005, when plans for a new baseball stadium threatened the site, which archaeologists had pinpointed using historical maps.

    The place has haunted McQuinn ever since her initial visit in 2003, soon after she first learned of its existence. "I started weeping and couldn't stop. There was a presence here. I felt a bond," she said. "It's a heaviness that I've felt over and over again."

    Digging from August to December in "this place of sighs," as James B. Simmons, an abolitionist minister, called the jail in 1895, Laird and his team found evidence of a kitchen and cobblestone courtyard on the upper level of Lumpkin's property, but didn't verify finding the jail itself until the last weeks of work. Even then they couldn't do much more than mark the spot, because groundwater from a nearby creek filled up trenches almost as fast as they could be dug. Decades of dampness had its advantages, though. Because oxygen does not penetrate wet soil, the bacteria that typically break down organic matter don't survive. As a result, many details of daily life were preserved: wooden toothbrushes, leather shoes and fabric.

    The archaeologists found no whipping rings, iron bars or other harsh artifacts of slavery, but there were traces of the variety of lives within the compound. Shards of tableware included both fine hand-painted English china and coarse earthenware. Parts of a child's doll were also recovered on the site, a hint of playtime in a place where some people were starved into submission. To whom did the doll belong? Did its owner also belong to someone?

     "Robert Lumpkin came out of nowhere," says Philip Schwarz, a professor emeritus of history at Virginia Commonwealth University who has researched the Lumpkin family for years. Lumpkin began his career as an itinerant businessman, traveling through the South and buying unwanted slaves before purchasing an existing jail compound in Richmond in the 1840s.With a designated "whipping room," where slaves were stretched out on the floor and flogged, the jail functioned as a human clearinghouse and as a purgatory for the rebellious.

    Archaeologists knew that Robert Lumpkin's slave jail stood in one of the lowest parts of Richmond, Virginia—a sunken spot known as Shockoe Bottom. From the 1830s to the Civil War, when Richmond was the largest American slave-trading hub outside of New Orleans, "the devil's half acre," as Lumpkin's complex was called, sat amid a swampy cluster of tobacco warehouses, gallows and African-American cemeteries. This winter, after five months of digging, researchers uncovered the foundation of the two-and-a-half-story brick building where hundreds of people were confined and tortured. Buried under nearly 14 feet of earth, the city's most notorious slave jail was down a hill some eight feet below the rest of Lumpkin's complex—the lowest of the low.

    "People inside would have felt hemmed in, trapped," says Matthew Laird, whose firm, the James River Institute for Archaeology Inc., uncovered the 80- by 160-foot plot. On a wet December day, the site was a deep, raw pit pocked with mud puddles, with an old brick retaining wall that divided the bottom—which soaked workers were struggling to pump dry—into two distinct tiers.

    A century and a half ago, there would have been plenty of traffic back and forth between the upper level of the complex, where the master lived and entertained guests, and the lower, where slaves waited to be sold. Lumpkin, a "bully trader" known as a man with a flair for cruelty, fathered five children with a black woman named Mary, who was a former slave and who eventually acted as his wife and took his name. Mary had at least some contact with the unfortunates her husband kept in chains, on one occasion smuggling a hymnal into the prison for an escaped slave named Anthony Burns.

    "Imagine the pressure that was applied, and what she had to live through," says Delores McQuinn, chairwoman of Richmond's Slave Trail Commission, which promotes awareness of the city's antebellum past and sponsored much of the dig.

    Though Lumpkin's jail stood only three blocks from where the state capitol building is today, except for local history buffs "no one had a clue that this was here," McQuinn says. Razed in the 1870s or '80s, the jail and Lumpkin's other buildings were long buried beneath a parking lot for university students, part of it lost forever under a roaring strip of Interstate 95. Preservation efforts didn't coalesce until 2005, when plans for a new baseball stadium threatened the site, which archaeologists had pinpointed using historical maps.

    The place has haunted McQuinn ever since her initial visit in 2003, soon after she first learned of its existence. "I started weeping and couldn't stop. There was a presence here. I felt a bond," she said. "It's a heaviness that I've felt over and over again."

    Digging from August to December in "this place of sighs," as James B. Simmons, an abolitionist minister, called the jail in 1895, Laird and his team found evidence of a kitchen and cobblestone courtyard on the upper level of Lumpkin's property, but didn't verify finding the jail itself until the last weeks of work. Even then they couldn't do much more than mark the spot, because groundwater from a nearby creek filled up trenches almost as fast as they could be dug. Decades of dampness had its advantages, though. Because oxygen does not penetrate wet soil, the bacteria that typically break down organic matter don't survive. As a result, many details of daily life were preserved: wooden toothbrushes, leather shoes and fabric.

    The archaeologists found no whipping rings, iron bars or other harsh artifacts of slavery, but there were traces of the variety of lives within the compound. Shards of tableware included both fine hand-painted English china and coarse earthenware. Parts of a child's doll were also recovered on the site, a hint of playtime in a place where some people were starved into submission. To whom did the doll belong? Did its owner also belong to someone?

     "Robert Lumpkin came out of nowhere," says Philip Schwarz, a professor emeritus of history at Virginia Commonwealth University who has researched the Lumpkin family for years. Lumpkin began his career as an itinerant businessman, traveling through the South and buying unwanted slaves before purchasing an existing jail compound in Richmond in the 1840s.With a designated "whipping room," where slaves were stretched out on the floor and flogged, the jail functioned as a human clearinghouse and as a purgatory for the rebellious.

    Burns, the escaped slave who, after fleeing Virginia, was recaptured in Boston and returned to Richmond under the Fugitive Slave Act, was confined in Lumpkin's jail for four months in 1854, until Northern abolitionists purchased his freedom. According to an account Burns gave his biographer, Charles Emery Stevens, the slave was isolated in a room "only six or eight feet square," on a top floor accessible by trapdoor. Most of the time he was kept handcuffed and fettered, causing "his feet to swell enormously....The fetters also prevented him from removing his clothing by day or night, and no one came to help him....His room became more foul and noisome than the hovel of a brute; loathsome creeping things multiplied and rioted in the filth." He was fed "putrid meat" and given little water and soon fell seriously ill. Through the cracks in the floor he observed a female slave stripped naked for a potential buyer.

    Meanwhile, Lumpkin sent two of his mixed-race daughters to finishing school in Massachusetts. According to Charles Henry Corey, a former Union army chaplain, Lumpkin later sent the girls and their mother to live in the free state of Pennsylvania, concerned that a "financial contingency might arise when these, his own beautiful daughters, might be sold into slavery to pay his debts."

    "He was both an evil man and a family man," Schwarz says.

    Lumpkin was in Richmond in April 1865 when the city fell to Union soldiers. Shackling some 50 enslaved and weeping men, women and children together, the trader tried to board a train heading south, but there was no room. He died not long after the war ended. In his will, Lumpkin described Mary only as a person "who resides with me." Nonetheless he left her all his real estate.

    In 1867, a Baptist minister named Nathaniel Colver was looking for a space for the black seminary he hoped to start. After a day of prayer, he set out into the city's streets, where he met Mary in a group of "colored people," recalling her as a "large, fair-faced freedwoman, nearly white, who said that she had a place which she thought I could have." After the bars were torn out of the windows, Mary leased Lumpkin's jail as the site of the school that became Virginia Union University, now on Lombardy Street in Richmond.

    "The old slave pen was no longer 'the devil's half acre' but God's half acre," Simmons wrote.

    Mary Lumpkin went on to run a restaurant in Louisiana with one of her daughters. She died in New Richmond, Ohio, in 1905 at 72.

    McQuinn, who is also a minister, hopes the site will one day become a museum. Though it has been reburied for the time being, she says it will never again be forgotten: "The sweetest part," she says, "is now we have a story to tell."

    Abigail Tucker is Smithsonian's staff writer.


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    Comments

    Thank God! This miserable hell hole exposed and used as a rememinded of the fact that the horrible halocaust of the 100 million Africans that sometimes died in passage was met with even crueler treatment, when they touched the shores of this country. Their dignity long stripped as their privacy was violated. Yes there is a story here and all the citizens must know of it to keep history from repeating itself. Most of the screams of pain from centuries gone, were silenced when they paved over the jail. Now the tortured souls can rest as long as we respect their hard lives that built Richmonds historical beautiful districts, and give them the respect they have long, long deserved as human beings.

    Posted by KimJones on February 25,2009 | 02:24PM

    African Holocaust of 100 million? Isn't this number a little high. We need to get past slavery once and for all. It was not a good thing in our country's history, but it is history. Let it remain history and get on with rebuiling this country. Every culture at one time was a slave - now lets move on.

    Posted by Debbie on February 26,2009 | 11:59PM

    "African Holocaust of 100 million? Isn't this number a little high." Actually, it's not. The most significant challenge is to simply understand that slavery was the labor engine that built the economy, not only of the U.S., but of the northern and southern hemispheres of this globe. And the very existance of this unpaid labor system directly and negatively impacted the wages and market prospects for tradespeople and small farmers across the country, but particularly for those that lived in and around slave-holding territories. If, by "get over it", we mean to truly understand what slavery was and resulted in for our nation's principles, policies and practices so that we can move forward in a better, smarter, more humane manner - then let's get on with it.

    Posted by Ana Edwards on February 27,2009 | 12:08PM

    I couldn't have said it better Mrs. Edwards.

    Posted by Marjorie Gillingham, DHL on February 27,2009 | 07:16PM

    Let's not forget that there are over 27,000,000 (yes, million) slaves in our "modern" world. Sad but true fact, and what's being done about it ???

    Posted by Daniel L. Thaxton on February 27,2009 | 07:50PM

    I am reminded of the "Door of No Return",at the Goree Island Museum off the coast of Senegal, West Africa. As Kim Jones stated, these prisons were "Hell Holes" of unbearable cruelty. When I read about the whipping room in the Lumpkin jail I had a flash back of going inside the cell of the "Recalcitrants".The floor was constructed as a slope that caused captured slaves to be piled one on top of another. It is time that the city of Richmond honored the historical past by constructing a museum that documents what role slavery played in our not so distant past. Slavery still exists in the 21st century as unpaid labor, however, the post-traumatic slave syndrome exists in our society with individuals who say we must "get over it". We get over trauma by first admitting that it occurred and learn how we can heal from it. Thanks to Delores McQuinn for her determination to honor this historical past.

    Posted by Shirley E. Johnson on February 28,2009 | 07:14PM

    Keep up with the ongoing story of Lumpkin's Jail in Richmond: http://riverdistrictnews.com/tag/lumpkins-jail/

    Posted by john m on March 4,2009 | 09:54AM

    Kim Jones- Richmond's beautiful historic neighborhoods were built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after slavery ended in the US. The State Capitol was probably built with slave labor, as the US Capitol was.

    Posted by Stuart on March 5,2009 | 08:36AM

    I live in Richmond,Va and adjacent to this site on the opposite side of the street is a yet to be researched Slave burial ground where the remains of hundreds of slaves (many from the Lumpkins site) are believed to be buried. This site was(and part of the area still is) a parking lot up until 2-3 years ago and Virginia Commonwealth University (V.C.U.) still owns the property and have only recently decided to halt any further "parking lot improvement" plans. Their are also those who want to move a new baseball stadium onto the land near the Lumpkins site(the entire area around the Lumpkins site was once a human market place)The Shockoe Bottom area is fundamentally an outside market area with nightclubs,bars&restuarants,apts,condo's train station,art galleries etc..The historic preservation has to be regonized. For those who want to state themes such as "get over it" or "slavery existed everywhere in the world" allow me to briefly make a point....none of those "other" past or present slave nations ever claimed to be be "God's" country (although some Jews may argue that God gave Isreal to the hebrews but that's another discussion) to the point of included those themes in it's Constitution,none of those "other" countries openly claimed to be the greatest nation in modern history based on it's blessings from God & it's open opppurtunity ideology either,hypocracy can't define democracy.

    Posted by Dee on March 5,2009 | 08:29PM

    I was involved in saving a slave cemetery from developers in Dallas. I am 78 y.o. grew up in the old Freedman"s Town of Dallas,TX. So I had been told by elders that this was a place where slaves where buried. The area was all black at this time (1930-1948). This land is now some of the most valuable in Dallas, now referred to as Uptown. we worked with the state highway department, and solicited state , city and private funds. This is now the most beautiful memorial in the city.

    Posted by Robert Prince MD on March 6,2009 | 05:41PM

    If we are ever going to heal as a nation of people, we need to get past the wrong-doings of our previous generations. No one in my family's history owned slaves. I've never been prejudiced against another race of people. I grew up in the sixties in Montgomery, Alabama. I saw the unfair treatment. It was wrong. I didn't agree with it then and I don't now. There is too much hate and resentment in this world. We need to love one another and live by the golden rule. We can't change the past, but we can learn from it and change the future through forgiveness. I celebrate our diversity. It is our strength as a nation. We need to move forward. God bless...

    Posted by Jack Jackson on March 19,2009 | 11:28AM

    I am glad that have started digging to uncover the past in Richmond, alot of the buildings have been tored down and the past is lost forever, we have only a few people that lived during thoses times that can really tell the stories to be pasted on to the next generations of people. The real stories need to be told to all

    Posted by Jackie on March 24,2009 | 05:37PM

    It is with much honor that I come upon this article as my third Great Grandfather was Nathaniel Colver and after much research have discovered all of the wonderful duties that he, as a Baptist Minister and as a Man, accomplished in his life. It is a goal of mine to come to Virginia and visit this site along with the University that exists today.

    Posted by Jenifer on March 29,2009 | 02:49PM

    I was so lucky to find this article about the Lumpkin Jail at one of my clients' homes. I was actually looking at a different article when the name Robert Lumpkin caught my eye. I believe this may be the missing link I have been looking for. Robert Lumpkin and his 'acting' wife may be relatives to my family. I am looking forward to any new discoveries in and around this plot. Even though we may not like some of the things our country has done in the past, we can't just sweep them under the rug as if these things never happened. Let's remember and learn from our mistakes so we can move on as a country.

    Posted by DeDe on April 2,2009 | 09:52PM

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