Lumpkin's Jail

The "whipping room" inside the jail allowed slaves to be fastened by their wrists and ankles to iron rings while lying on the floor, and flogged.

[10] The bottom floor was the main jail area, and typically temporarily held men, women and children who were fit to be sold to plantation owners or other slave traders.

[11] The jail featured "barred windows, high fences, chained gates opening to the rutted streets, and all seen and smelled through a film of cooking smoke and stench of human excrement.

"[9] At times, it was filled by so many slaves that they were virtually on top of one another, sometimes crammed into one room or floor and lacking toilets and outside access other than a small window.

Before the Civil War ended, he sent his wife and children to Pennsylvania to avoid their being sold back into slavery to pay off his debts.

In 1867, Mary Lumpkin leased the land to Nathaniel Colver, a Baptist minister looking for a place to establish a theological seminary for freedmen.

The most famous inmate was Anthony Burns, who had escaped slavery in Virginia, but was arrested in Boston and tried under the Fugitive Slave Law.

Though many lobbied for his release, he was sent back to Lumpkin's Jail and held for four more months until abolitionists raised sufficient funds to buy his freedom[contradictory].