George L. Robards was veteran of the war of 1812, who received, at the Battle of New Orleans, "a severe wound by having a bayonet run through his right leg, and afterward he walked to his home in Bullitt County, Kentucky.

[4] Robards eventually opened his own slave prison and trading operation, located on Short Street, in sight of the home of Abraham Lincoln's brother-in-law, Levi Todd.

[5] In 1850, Robards paid James McMillin US$600 (equivalent to $21,974 in 2023) to kidnap a legally free woman named Arian Belle, and her four-year-old child Martha, from Mason County, Kentucky, in the middle of the night.

Tis a place where negroes are kept for sale - Outer doors & windows all protected with iron grates, but inside the appointments are not only comfortable, but in many respects luxurious.

Many of the rooms are well carpeted & furnished, & very neat, and the inmates whilst here are treated with great indulgence & humanity, but I confess it impressed me with the idea of decorating the ox for the sacrifice.

In several of the rooms I found very handsome mulatto women, of fine persons and easy genteel manners, sitting at their needle work awaiting a purchaser.

"[8] Robards also had a slave pen behind his house on North Broadway, with "tiny brick cells eight feet square, furnished with straw and ventilated with a small iron-grated window high on the heavy wooden door.

"[9] According to J. Winston Coleman in Slavery Times in Kentucky (1940), "Robards' 'choice stock' of beautiful quadroon and octoroon girls...was indeed the talk and toast of steamboat barrooms, tippling houses and taverns, even as far away as old New Orleans.

Over the mint julep, planters' punch, and other potent beverages which make men reminiscent, many short-necked, beady-eyed Frenchmen and gangling hawk-faced Kentuckians and Tennesseans swapped vivid stories of the 'inspections' in Robards' jail, where the 'choice stock,' stripped to the skin, dumbly submitted to the leering gaze and intimate examination of traders ostensibly interested only in the physical soundness of prospective purchases.