A rendering of the planned slavery museum in Shockoe Bottom (Image courtesy SmithGroup)
With the debate over where to build a new ballpark for the Richmond Flying Squirrels now all but settled — the city selected a developer for a new stadium and mixed-use development along Arthur Ashe Boulevard in mid-September — plans for a national slavery museum in Shockoe Bottom are quietly moving forward, albeit at a slower pace.
Both projects have a history of fits and starts, and they share a connection: A group of local developers and business owners first proposed replacing The Diamond on North Side with a new Shockoe Bottom stadium, just north of the 17th Street Farmers Market, in 2003. But that proposal ran into immediate headwinds: Following the excavation of the Lumpkin’s Jail site in the early 2000s, preservationists uncovered a slave burial ground nearby. Both are located just west of the railroad tracks and Main Street Station.
Then in August 2004, Tropical Storm Gaston flooded the city, leaving the Bottom buried under more than 9 feet of water. The flood washed out the ballpark development for the time being, but it reemerged again in 2013 under then-Mayor Dwight Jones. An attempt to meld the area’s slave-trading history with the ballpark development, however, never gained traction.
But plans for a slavery museum, first floated by former Virginia Gov. and Richmond Mayor Doug Wilder, began to take hold, along with plans for 9-acre memorial park. And last year, Mayor Levar Stoney made a public push for the museum, recommending that the city invest $25 million to $50 million toward the effort over the next five years. The city also released a draft plan in July 2021 to develop the memorial park as part of the new Heritage District.
In a way, those plans allowed the city to move forward on the Diamond District, says Ana Edwards, a public historian and chair of the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project, an advocacy group that helped craft the Heritage District plan. “It freed people to then say, ‘OK, now we know what we can do in the rest of the city,’ ” Edwards says.
While the city has set aside $3.5 million to continue the planning and design of the Heritage District, the slavery museum is a different story. SmithGroup, an architecture firm and the city’s consultant on the project, estimated that a new museum could cost as much as $225 million. The state earmarked roughly $12 million over the last decade, but the bulk of the funding is expected to come from private fundraising.
Del. Delores McQuinn, who serves on the board of the National Slavery Museum Foundation, insists money won’t be an issue. “There’s no amount too big, and we want everyone to have some investment in this,” she says.
But not everyone envisions memorializing slavery in Shockoe in the same way. Edwards is concerned about the cost and challenge of constructing a museum in a flood plain and the potential long-term maintenance costs. She says the city should consider redeveloping the train shed next to Main Street Station as a museum instead.
Regardless, advocates agree that it’s well past time for something to be done.
“We’ve all got to come to a place where we understand the story must be told,” McQuinn says.
