Davenport Trading Company

Davenport Trading Company. The Last Building Known to have been used in the Slave Trade. The brick structure before you once held the Davenport Trading Company. While it was primarily a dry goods business, it also functioned as a general auction site. This included farm animals, equipment …and slaves. The large open area on the first floor, usually filled with barrels of flour, bacon and cloth, could be easily cleared for crowds that gathered to watch the sale of human beings. Although located in the heart of the slave trading district, this was not a major sales site. Those took place in the large hotels along Main St, one block north of here. (There is an interpretive sign about this located at 15th and Main St.), Richmond was one of the major trading sites in the nation for the sale of enslaved people. It also had the reputation for being the most crude and degrading. Local on-lookers and even curious travelers from Europe, came to view the spectacle., . Prospective buyers might jam their fingers into a man’s mouth to inspect the teeth or strip him almost naked to check for injuries or signs of punishment. Women would not be publicly stripped, but might be intimately and embarrassingly inspected. There could be no objection., . Women with small children would be auctioned off together, but older children might well be sold separately. The walls would echo with the screams of protest, tears and pleading. It was a dramatic, sensual and cruel entertainment., . Light skinned and particularly attractive teenage girls would be sold separately in less public settings. They fetched high prices as mistresses … or for short, high value lives as prostitutes., The building still looks pretty much as it did when constructed in the 1830’s. Although it was gutted by fire in 1891, the interior was re-constructed and pieces of the exterior walls can be seen to have been repaired. The brick arches , where wagons once entered the main room , are original. Old and historic, the structure is still sound. It is now being renovated and developed for upscale apartments., Sign funded by the students of The New Community School