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Lumpkin’s Jail was located on a half an acre of land in what is now Richmond’s Historic Shockoe Bottom. The jail was known as “The Devil’s Half Acre” because it was a holding pen and punishment and breaking center for more than 300,000 slaves. Lumpkin’s Jail was owned by slave dealer Robert Lumpkin and was the largest antebellum slave trade site outside of New Orleans.

            The property was inherited by Lumpkin’s widow, Mrs. Mary Anne Lumpkin, one of his former slaves. Mrs. Lumpkin leased the property to Rev. Robert Colver in 1867, who used the land and the buildings for a school to educate freed slaves. The use of the jail as a school for freed slaves earned the site a new nickname,“God’s Half Acre”. The school later expanded and moved from the site of Lumpkin’s Jail in 1870. The school would eventually become Virginia Union in 1899.

extended from 15^th Street to Broad Street. The site contained a two-story brick building, 41 feet long and 21 feet wide with barbed windows.  In the 1890s, Richmond Ironworks was built over the site and The Seaboard Railroad Depot followed in the early 1900s. The former site of Lumpkin’s Jail is now a parking lot bordered by Main Street Train Station on  East Main Street.