Libby Prison

Near this site from about 1845 until 1889 stood the building that became Richmond’s famous Libby Prison. Originally built as a warehouse by wealthy Richmond businessman John Enders, Sr., part of the structure was leased before the Civil War by Northern-born Luther Libby, who sold groceries and shipping supplies there. When the war began, the Confederate government evicted Libby and used the building as a prison for Union officers captured on battlefields throughout the South. Later in the war, nearly all Union prisoners in Virginia came through Libby before being sent to other facilities such as Belle Isle in Richmond or Andersonville in Georgia. On Feb. 9, 1864, 109 Union officers escaped through a 50-foot-long tunnel, and only 48 were recaptured. After the war, the prison was carefully dismantled and moved to Chicago, where it was reconstructed as the “Libby Prison National War Museum,” then demolished there about 1898 to make room for a coliseum. Prisoners remembered severe overcrowding and suffering there, with men packed together on bare floors, hospital patients crammed into rooms amid maggots and filth, and hundreds enduring the slow passage of time sustained by hope.

Richmond, Virginia · United States