1315
Duke Street

The building at 1315 Duke Street was acquired in 1828 by Isaac Franklin Person Isaac Franklin b. 1789 · d. 1846 Tennessee-born slave trader who, with partner John Armfield, operated the largest domestic slave trading firm in the United States during the 1830s. Franklin managed the firm's New … and John Armfield as the headquarters of their newly formed partnership. Behind the brick front house stood a walled compound of pens and quarters in which Franklin & Armfield held enslaved people awaiting shipment south ^[1] Source 1 Franklin & Armfield ledgers Manuscript . An estimated 1,200 enslaved people passed through the Duke Street compound in a typical year at the firm’s peak.

Over the eight years of the partnership’s active operation, Franklin & Armfield shipped thousands of enslaved people from Alexandria to New Orleans and Natchez aboard the firm’s three brigs — the Tribune, the Uncas, and the Isaac Franklin — with overland coffles also departing regularly from the Duke Street compound for Tennessee ^[2] Source 2 Powell, History of Old Alexandria, 1928 Book . The trade broke apart families across the upper South and delivered its victims into the expanding cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South. Franklin retired from active trade in 1836; the firm’s successors continued the business into the 1850s under different operators.

During the Civil War, Union forces used the compound as a jail for Confederate prisoners and later as a barracks ^[3] Source 3 NARA Civil War records Government record . In the twentieth century the building housed a succession of businesses before being acquired in 1996 by the Northern Virginia Urban League, which opened a small museum in the basement. The City of Alexandria purchased the property in 2020 and reopened the expanded Freedom House Museum in 2022.