Qualla: Shockoe Bottom

Shockoe Bottom: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the antebellum decades before the Civil War, more enslaved Africans were bought and sold here than anywhere in the United States outside New Orleans. The valley below Shockoe Hill, beside the falls of the James, was the country's second-largest domestic slave-trading center. Fifteenth Street was called Wall Street because of the money that flowed through it. Sixty-nine slave dealers and auction houses operated within a few blocks. Today the same streets hold restaurants, apartments converted from tobacco warehouses, a farmer's market, and a train station. Beneath them - and partly beneath Interstate 95 - lies the ground where Richmond buried the people the auction houses sold. This is a neighborhood whose surface and whose underneath tell very different stories about the same place.

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Image: Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shockoe Bottom: A Bottom Between Two Hills

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0. Shockoe Bottom, historically called Shockoe Valley, lies just east of downtown Richmond between two of the city's original hills: Shockoe Hill to the north, Church Hill to the south. Colonel William Mayo's 1737 plan of Richmond included most of this ground, making the Bottom one ...

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Image: Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shockoe Bottom: The Slave Trade That Built Richmond

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the 1830s, the domestic slave trade made Shockoe Bottom one of the largest markets for human beings in the Western Hemisphere. After the international slave trade was outlawed in 1808, slave-owning regions of the upper South - exhausted tobacco land in Virginia, Maryland, Kent...

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Image: Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States | CC BY-SA 2.0

Shockoe Bottom: The Burial Ground Beneath the Highway

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ron Cogswell, CC BY 2.0. The people sold from Lumpkin's Jail had to be buried somewhere. The first municipal burial ground for enslaved and free Black Richmonders - now called the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground - sat at Fifteenth and East Broad Street, a few yards from the jail itself. It operated ...

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Image: Ron Cogswell | CC BY 2.0

Shockoe Bottom: The 1865 Fire and the Rebuilt Streets

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Morgan Riley, Midlothian, Virginia, CC BY 3.0. On the night of April 2, 1865, with Union troops approaching, evacuating Confederate forces were ordered to burn the city's tobacco warehouses to keep them out of Federal hands. The fires got loose. They swept through Shockoe Slip, the commercial district immediately west of the ...

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Image: Morgan Riley, Midlothian, Virginia | CC BY 3.0

Shockoe Bottom: Memory, Memorial, and Flood

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Modern Shockoe Bottom is contested ground. The 1995 completion of the James River Flood Wall and Canal Walk made the Bottom developable again after centuries of periodic flooding. Old tobacco-row warehouses became apartments. Then in 2004, Hurricane Gaston flooded Shockoe Creek's...

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Image: Acroterion | CC BY-SA 4.0