The legacy of Mary Lumpkin: How a formerly enslaved woman turned Richmond’s notorious ‘Devil’s Half Acre’ into ‘God’s Half Acre’

This wouldn’t be the first time Kristen Green became curious about a piece of Virginia history that led her to write a book.

In 2011, Green was a reporter with the Richmond Times-Dispatch and writing about a graveyard for free and enslaved people, discovered buried under a parking lot. During her research, she learned of the remnants of a nearby slave jail also hidden under a layer of asphalt, along East Broad Street behind the Main Street Amtrak Station.

Green is Virginia born and knew that Richmond was in the thick of trafficking the enslaved before the Civil War. But Robert Lumpkin’s jail was notorious throughout the South.

It housed thousands of children, men and women who were shipped to busy ports, including Norfolk and New Orleans. Owners could also bring their enslaved to Lumpkin’s to have them whipped for a fee when owners didn’t want to bloody themselves.

The jail earned the name “The Devil’s Half Acre.”

Green read a Smithsonian magazine article about Lumpkin and how he’d fathered children with an enslaved woman named Mary and that Mary “acted as his wife.”

“I know she couldn’t be his wife, because she was enslaved, she couldn’t consent,” and interracial marriage was against the law, Green said. “So I was like, “What in the world? This is crazy.”

Green couldn’t stop thinking about Mary and kept digging. This spring she released the book, “The Devil’s Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail.”

She learned of a woman who used her predicament to advantage: She freed her children and got them educated.

Mary also played a role in the founding of Virginia Union University, a historically Black college that still exists in Richmond.

Green found little in public records about Mary but tracked down descendants; some now identify as white and others Black. Several had never heard of Mary. Some seemed to be ashamed of the connection and left Mary’s name out of their family Bible’s genealogical chart; others muddied the family story by referring to her as a distant relative with an “Indigenous” background.

But Green found Mary Lumpkin’s great-great-granddaughter, Carolivia Herron, an author and educator who grew up with an oral history of Mary that was told with pride. The family history is that Mary told her enslaver that he could do anything to her but he couldn’t hurt the children and that they had to be emancipated. The five children Mary bore to Robert were sent to free states, where they lived. Mary was also allowed to buy property in her name, Green said, a rarity.

Mary, Green said, “was negotiating and using that agency and determining what her kids’ lives would look like, and what her life would look like with the limited power she had.”

To understand Robert Lumpkin’s business, Green read through fragile court documents, his will, property records and newspaper ads. She studied census records; traveled to Massachusetts where Mary’s two daughters went to school; Pennsylvania, where Mary owned a home; and Ohio, Mary’s final resting place.

She read stories of other enslaved women in similar circumstances. Harriet Jacobs, for example, hid in her grandmother’s attic in Edenton for seven years to escape the sexual advances of her enslaver. Green read of women who killed themselves or chewed cotton root to induce abortions when they got pregnant after rape.

She felt it necessary to tell Mary’s story.

It’s easier to chronicle well-documented cases, such as that of Harriet Tubman, who escaped and returned to slave states several times to free others. Green said Tubman’s story is often highlighted for its daredevil attributes, such as how she carried a gun and waded through dangerous waters to avoid capture. But Tubman did not have children.

“That is a very masculine story and most women could not escape, would not escape, because they had children and most had to endure,” Green said. “I’m not saying that Mary Lumpkin’s story is the typical enslaved woman story. But I think the more kinds of stories of enslaved women that we can tell, the more breadth and depth we bring to Americans’ understanding of the enslaved experience.”

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Mary Lumpkin was born around 1832 on a Virginia plantation whose identity Green wasn’t able to determine.

She was described as “nearly white,” a sign that her mother, and perhaps her grandmother, were also victims of rape by white men.

Lumpkin bought the jail in 1844 and lived on the complex as the slave industry prospered in Richmond. It isn’t clear when he bought Mary, but he was about 40 when she gave birth to their first child in 1845. Mary was 13.

Because she was enslaved, her children were enslaved. During the next 12 years she would have four more who lived into adulthood; two others died when they were young.

Green’s book details the network of jail operators in Richmond who regularly kept enslaved women. Others were sold as “fancy girls” at high prices for white men wanting sexual partners.

Several of the women helped run the boarding houses that were connected to the jails and housed traveling slave dealers; the women also cooked and made clothes for those kept in the slave pens. The women were often taught to read, which was against the law. If they outlived their owners, they were often freed.

In the book, Green wonders what type of life Mary and the children had. Did they get better food than the other enslaved people? What was their housing like? Did Mary feel a sense of security in being the mother of Lumpkin’s children, even as other mixed and “nearly white” offspring were being sold at the jail?

Was Mary scared that her daughters would be sold and raped as she had been?

Lumpkin appeared to claim his children, however. The two oldest, daughters Martha and Annie, were sent to Massachusetts for school in the mid-1850s. The girls were described as being able to pass for white.

Green writes that while the girls were away, Mary solidified plans with Lumpkin to set herself and the children free. Green said the Herron oral history states that the three sons — the oldest boy named after his father — were likely also sent away to be educated, too.

It appeared Mary was allowed to travel freely and she did, to Massachusetts and Ohio; she befriended and wrote letters to other women who had children with jail owners and had been sent to live free elsewhere.

In 1857, Mary traveled to Philadelphia and bought a home under a pseudonym. Green speculates it might have been a calculated move to give Mary autonomy and that Lumpkin had to sign off on it “as the most efficient way to protect the asset for her and their children.”

By 1860, Mary and the children were living in Philadelphia. In 1861, she is listed in the city directory as “Robert Lumpkin’s widow,” which Green supposes might have been the line Mary told people.

After the war ended, Mary returned to Richmond. When Lumpkin died the following year, he left the jail property, a home he owned in Alabama and all the cash he had to “the woman who resides with me” — Mary.

He stipulated that if she married, the inheritance would go to their children. His property wasn’t worth much after the war and Mary had to work to pay the tax bills.

In 1867, she met a minister who mentioned he was looking for a building to open a theological school for Black men; white business owners were not interested in supporting his proposition. Mary offered to lease the jail. It became known as the Colver Institute. It later relocated and became Virginia Union.

Mary moved to New Richmond, Ohio, and died in 1905.

Green quoted a man who’d met Mary and saw the school prosper:

“The old slave pen was no longer the ‘devil’s half acre’ but God’s half acre.”

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In 2001, Green was a reporter in San Diego when she read a Washington Post article about her hometown, Farmville. Farmville is the county seat of Prince Edward County — which, in 1959, closed its public schools rather than follow the Supreme Court’s order to integrate them.

The county established a private school for white students. African American students were on their own; to go to school, they had to move in with relatives in other parts of the state or out of state.

The public schools were closed for five years.

Green had grown up with a “skinny” version of the story but didn’t realize the depth of lingering pain until she read the Post article. As she started digging, she learned how much her family had been involved in founding the segregationist academy; her grandfather was active in the group that called for closing the schools. Her mother worked at the academy, as did one of her brothers; she herself had graduated from the school.

In 2015, she wrote the New York Times bestseller, “Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County.”

As the story of Prince Edward has become an often told story, she hopes the same will come of Mary.

“I don’t see my story as being the final story. … Hopefully it leads other researchers to find out more about her,” Green said. “We don’t really know anything about her day-to-day life, or how she felt about any of this, but we might know more of her timeline. This was important to me and I feel like this all of our history. This isn’t just Black history; this is our country’s history.”

Denise M. Watson, 757-446-2504, denise.watson@pilotonline.com