The Devil's Half Acre
Richmond, Virginia, United States
The site of Lumpkins slave jail in Shockoe Bottom, reclaimed by the Black community as sacred memorial ground and named by it.
In Shockoe Bottom, Richmond, stood Lumpkin's jail, the largest slave-trading complex in the city's economy, where thousands of people were held before sale south. Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman held there by Robert Lumpkin, and the site's later Black life gave the ground its afterlife: after the war the complex became the school that grew into Virginia Union University, and the community's name for the site, the Devil's Half Acre, keeps the truth of it in the name itself.
The city's archaeology and memorialization program, the feasibility studies, the Shockoe Legacy work, and the opening memorialization of the site have made it formal ground of remembrance, and community ceremonies mark it. It is sacred ground in the strict sense: consecrated by what happened on it and by who claimed it afterward.
Visiting
15th and E Broad St, Shockoe Bottom, Richmond; the interpretive site is publicly accessible. See the city's Lumpkin's Jail site pages.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories