Franklin and Armfield Slave Office (1315 Duke Street)

E-131

Isaac Franklin and John Armfield leased this brick building with access to the wharves and docks in 1828 as a holding pen for enslaved people being shipped from Northern Virginia to Louisiana. They purchased the building and three lots in 1832. From this location Armfield bought bondspeople at low prices and shipped them south to his partner Franklin, in Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana, to be sold at higher prices. By the 1830s they often sold 1,000 people annually, operating as one of the largest slave-trading companies in the United States until 1836. Slave traders continuously owned the property until 1861.

Department of Historic Resources, 2005

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Artemel, Janice G., Elizabeth A. Crowell, and Jeff Parker. The Alexandria Slave Pen: The Archeology of Urban Captivity, 1987; Fredric Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Lucy Barber, African American History Sources, A Bibliography. The Alexandria Library Lloyd House Archives; Jim Barnett and H. Clark Burkett, "The Forks of the Road Slave Market at Natchez," http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/features/feature36/forks_of_the_road.html; Franklin and Armfield House-Office Slave Pen (1315 Duke Street), National Register of Historic Places Archives File (100-105), Department of Historic Resources, Richmond, Virginia; Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999; Calder Loth, ed., The Virginia Landmarks Register, 4th. ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 26; Rev. James McKim, A Sketch of the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia contained in two letters. Originally published in The Emancipator; republished by the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Anti-slavery Society, 1838; Michael T. Miller, compiler. Slave Traders Operating in Alexandria, D.C.—Virginia & Washington, D.C.; Smith, William Francis and T. Michael Miller. A Seaport Saga: Portrait of Old Alexandria, Virginia, pp 54, 64; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989; Martha von Briesen, ed., The Letters of Elijah Fletcher, A Vermont School Teacher; Sherri Williams, The Clarion Ledger/Mississippi News, “Forks of the Road Pain Inspires Quest,” Feb. 29, 2000: 4.