Richmond's largest antebellum slave-trading complex, buried under I-95 for decades and now the subject of an ongoing memorial development
E Franklin St near N 15th St, Richmond, VA 23223
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Outdoor site with historical markers; no admission charge.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved parking lot and sidewalks; outdoor interpretive markers
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1844 · Richmond Slave Trail · National Slavery Museum Site · Virginia Union University Origins · Anthony Burns Held Here
The complex on Wall Street (present-day 15th Street) in Shockoe Bottom operated as Richmond's central node in the domestic slave trade for more than three decades. Robert Lumpkin purchased three lots on November 27, 1844, consolidating a facility that earlier dealers had already established. The compound included a two-and-a-half-story brick jail building approximately 40 feet long, a guest house for slave traders, a kitchen and bar, and Robert Lumpkin's own residence.
Thousands of enslaved people passed through the facility before being sold at auction or marched to destinations further south. Contemporary accounts document systematic cruelty, including the use of the jail as a 'breaking' and punishment facility. Richmond, positioned at the intersection of major rail lines, was one of the largest domestic slave-trading centers in the country — second only to New Orleans by the late antebellum period.
Among those held at Lumpkin's was Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave whose 1854 Boston arrest and return to Virginia under the Fugitive Slave Act became a national flashpoint for the abolitionist movement. Approximately 300,000 enslaved people passed through Richmond-area trading operations during the antebellum period.
Union troops entered Richmond on April 3, 1865. Robert Lumpkin fled with a group of enslaved people but was captured. After emancipation, Mary Lumpkin — whom Robert Lumpkin had treated as a common-law wife — inherited the property. She leased it in 1867 to Nathaniel Colver, a Baptist minister, who established Colver Institute there, a theological seminary for freed Black men. That institution grew into Virginia Union University.
Demolition of the original structures began March 10, 1888. By the mid-twentieth century, Interstate 95 construction and a parking lot had buried the site. Archaeological excavations beginning in 2006 and 2008 recovered the jail's foundation and more than 6,000 artifacts. Richmond's city government designated the site for a memorial and interpretive pavilion; planning and development remain ongoing as of 2026.
Sources
The site's power is historical rather than paranormal. Accounts from enslaved people who passed through describe a compound designed to systematically break resistance — the name 'Devil's Half Acre' was not applied by outsiders but by those held there. The evidence of that history — the brick foundation, the auction records, the letters of the traders — is more concrete than any ghost story attached to the address.
Modern Richmond ghost tour operators occasionally reference Shockoe Bottom in the context of the city's antebellum slave-trade geography, but the Lumpkin's Jail site is specifically documented and interpreted as a historical memorial. The Richmond Slave Trail Commission erected its first marker here in 2011. The ongoing memorial project treats the site as a place for acknowledgment and education rather than commercial paranormal tourism.
The transformation of the property — from 'the Devil's Half Acre' to 'God's Half Acre' after 1867, then buried under infrastructure, then recovered and excavated — gives the site a layered presence that local historians argue is more significant than any haunting narrative could be.
Two historical markers near the parking lot behind Main Street Station document the Lumpkin's Jail site, the slave trade operations, and the subsequent transformation of the site into a freedmen's seminary. The broader Richmond Slave Trail connects additional interpretive stops.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Montgomery, AL
On February 7, 1967, fire swept through Dale's Penthouse Restaurant on the 11th floor of the Walter Bragg Smith apartment building at 7 Clayton Street in Montgomery, killing 25 patrons. Investigators attributed the fire to a lit pipe left in a coat pocket in the coat-check area. The dead included local politicians and prominent Montgomery figures. The building was later renamed Capital Towers and continues as a residential high-rise.
Tombstone, AZ
Built in 1858 by German mining engineer Frederick Brunckow near the San Pedro River, the adobe cabin became the site of at least 21 documented killings between 1860 and 1890 — more per square foot than any other recorded location in territorial Arizona.
Jerome, AZ
Below Main Street, along Hull Avenue, Jerome's red-light district occupied a row of small one-room 'cribs' during the copper-mining boom; locals called the alley 'Husband's Alley.' In 1931 a woman known as Sammie Dean was found strangled in her crib, and the case was never solved.