Freedom House Museum

The building at 1315 Duke Street, originally built around 1812 as the residence of General Robert Young, commander of Alexandria's militia, later became the headquarters of one of the largest slave-trading firms in America. In 1828, Isaac Franklin and John Armfield formed a partnership to facilitate the interstate slave trade at a time when the importation of slaves had been outlawed in 1808 but the domestic trade was flourishing. As the need for slave labor in northern tobacco regions decreased in the 1820's and demand grew in the Cotton Belt, traders acquired slaves and shipped them south where they could command much higher prices. In the 1830s, Franklin and Armfield are estimated to have made profits of more than $100,000 a year from the domestic slave trade. They began to withdraw from trading in the late 1830s, and by 1858 their former slave pen was operating as Price, Birch, and Co. Abandoned at the start of the Civil War, the building then served as a Union jail. It is dedicated to Rev. Lewis Henry Bailey, a former slave sold through the slave pen to a family in Texas who, after being freed in 1863, walked back to Alexandria and founded several churches and schools in Virginia that still exist today.

Alexandria, Virginia · United States