Lumpkin’s Jail

An illustration in Charles H. Corey's A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary, with Reminiscences of Thirty Years' Work among the Colored People of the South (1895) depicts Lumpkin's Jail, a former holding cell in Richmond used by a slave trader named Robert Lumpkin. After the Civil War, the same building served as a school to train black ministers. 

Corey's book includes a letter from James B. Simmons, a secretary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, who visited Lumpkin's Jail and described it as "a low, rough, brick building known as the 'slave jail.'"  He went on:

In this building Lumpkin was accustomed to imprison the disobedient and punish the refractory. The stout iron bars were still to be seen across one or more of the windows during my repeated visits to this place. In the rough floor, and at about the center of it, was the stout iron staple and whipping ring.

It was in this old jail—this place of horrible memories to the blacks—that I found that noble man of God, Rev. Charles H. Corey, engaged in teaching a company of freedmen preachers …

Citation: A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary, With Reminiscences of Thirty Years' Work Among the Colored People of the South LC2852 .R4 T3 1895