Lumpkin's Jail

Lumpkin's Jail, also known as "the Devil's half acre", was a slave breeding farm, as well as a holding facility, or slave jail, located in Richmond, Virginia, just three blocks from the state capitol building. More than five dozen firms traded in enslaved human beings within blocks of Richmond's Wall Street (now 15th Street) between 14th and 18th Streets between the 1830s and the end of the American Civil War. Its final and most notorious owner, Robert Lumpkin, bought and sold slaves throughout the South for well over twenty years, and Lumpkin's Jail became Richmond's largest slave-holding facility.