Freedom House Future To Be Guided By Master Plan In Alexandria

ALEXANDRIA, VA — A master plan will be developed to outline the future of Freedom House Museum, a historical site helping to tell Alexandria's African American history.

Freedom House Museum, located at 1315 Duke Street, stands at the former site of a slave jail for Franklin and Armfield, one of the largest slave-trading companies in the U.S. The complex was used as a slave jail or pen between 1828 and 1836, holding enslaved people shipped from Northern Virginia to cotton and sugar plantations in the South.

Other companies in the human-trafficking trade used the complex after Franklin and Armfield. The complex is associated with trafficking thousands of Black men, women and children between 1828 and 1861.

In 1861, the Union Army liberated the slave jail and used it as a military prison during the Civil War. Most of the complex was demolished after the Civil War and underwent renovations several times. The Northern Virginia Urban League bought the property in 1997. The city's Office of Historic Alexandria started assisting the Urban League of Northern Virginia with operating the museum in 2018, and the city purchased the building in 2020.

While the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the closure of city museums, Freedom House Museum underwent renovations and history documentation. In May 2022, the museum reopened with three floors of temporary exhibits. The museum documents the roles of the historic site and Alexandria's role in the domestic slave trade, as well as sharing stories of African Americans in Alexandria. Freedom House Museum is on the National Register of Historic Places.

According to a city news release, a master plan for Freedom House "will provide a road map for the future use, interpretation, and preservation." The city will hold public meetings to discuss Freedom House Museum's mission, a potential name change, interpretive focus and its role in the community.

A survey on creating a master plan for Freedom House Museum is open until Jan. 13.