1315
Duke Street

The three-story brick Federal-style house at 1315 Duke Street was built in the 1810s by Brigadier General Robert Young, an officer in the District of Columbia militia, on what was then the western edge of town ^[1] Source 1 City of Alexandria, "History of 1315 Duke Street" Government record . Financial struggles forced Young to sell.

The Franklin & Armfield slave-trading complex (1828–1837)

By 1828 the property had been leased 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; in 1832 they purchased the building outright along with three adjacent lots ^[2] Source 2 Wikipedia, "Franklin and Armfield Office" Website . They converted the house into what contemporary documents called a “Negro Jail” or slave pen — adding structures behind the house with high whitewashed-brick walls, grated doors and windows. Abolitionist witness accounts describe two enclosed yards behind the main residence: enslaved men were held in a yard to the west, while women and children were kept in a yard to the east, the two yards separated by a passage and a strong grated-iron door ^[1] Source 1 City of Alexandria, "History of 1315 Duke Street" Government record . Alexandria’s substantial Quaker population supplied much of the local opposition to the trade and produced many of these witness accounts.

With trading agents across Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, Franklin & Armfield grew quickly. Ship manifests record at least 5,000 enslaved people trafficked through the Duke Street office; by the 1830s the firm was selling roughly one thousand people annually, controlling nearly half the coastal slave trade from the upper South to Louisiana — the cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South ^[1] Source 1 City of Alexandria, "History of 1315 Duke Street" Government record ^[2] Source 2 Wikipedia, "Franklin and Armfield Office" Website . The partners shipped most of their captives 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 ^[3] Source 3 Powell, History of Old Alexandria, 1928 Book . Franklin managed sales from Natchez; Armfield ran the Alexandria compound and procurement. Their combined wealth by the 1830s, scaled to 2021 dollars, ran into the billions ^[2] Source 2 Wikipedia, "Franklin and Armfield Office" Website . Franklin retired from active trade in 1837.

Successors: Kephart, Price, Birch (1846–1861)

In 1846 the property was sold to George Kephart, a former Franklin & Armfield agent who became, in Frederic Bancroft’s 1931 phrase, “the chief slave-dealing firm in [Virginia] and perhaps anywhere along the border between free and slave states” ^[4] Source 4 Frederic Bancroft, "Slave Trading in the Old South" (1931) Book . Kephart was later implicated in the Washington-area kidnapping that produced Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave ^[2] Source 2 Wikipedia, "Franklin and Armfield Office" Website . Kephart was succeeded by C. M. Price and John C. Cook, and from 1858 the firm operating on Duke Street was Price, Birch & Co., whose painted sign — “PRICE, BIRCH & CO. DEALERS IN SLAVES” — appears on the facade in the most widely-reproduced Civil War-era photographs of the building.

Civil War: liberation, prison, and L’Ouverture Hospital (1861–1866)

Union forces occupied Alexandria on May 24, 1861, and entered the slave pen to find it abandoned by Price and Birch — except, by one near-contemporary account, “an old man, chained to the middle of the floor by the leg” ^[1] Source 1 City of Alexandria, "History of 1315 Duke Street" Government record . Federal authorities seized the compound and operated it as a military prison for Union deserters until February 2, 1866 ^[2] Source 2 Wikipedia, "Franklin and Armfield Office" Website . Later in the war the building was repurposed as L’Ouverture Hospital, named for the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, where the U.S. Army cared for Black soldiers of the United States Colored Troops; in the same period the surrounding pens served as barracks for self-emancipated people who had reached Union lines and become known in the official records as “contrabands.”

Demolition, apartments, museum (1866–2026)

After the war most of the slave-pen compound was demolished by a private developer; only the original residence and its rear kitchen wing survived, their bricks possibly reused in adjacent townhouse construction ^[2] Source 2 Wikipedia, "Franklin and Armfield Office" Website . The house spent the next century as a boarding house and apartments; around 1905 an additional story was added and the original Federal facade was concealed behind a vernacular Empire-style remodel. In 1978 the building was designated a National Historic Landmark as the “Franklin and Armfield Office.” Major interior renovation in 1984 converted the building to office space. In 1997 the Northern Virginia Urban League purchased the property and opened a small Freedom House Museum in the basement. The City of Alexandria acquired the property in March 2020, and the expanded Freedom House Museum reopened in June 2022 with three exhibits exploring Black experience in Alexandria. Exterior restoration in 2024–2025 removed the c. 1905 modifications and recreated the building’s original Federal appearance using period photographs ^[1] Source 1 City of Alexandria, "History of 1315 Duke Street" Government record .