Was FAA HQ the Site of a Notorious Slave Pen? 

Theresa L. Kraus, FAA Historian 

The movie, “Twelve Years A Slave,” has sparked renewed interest in Washington, DC’s, role in 

the slave trade. The movie, based on the book of the same name, by Solomon Northrup, 

chronicles the story of a free black man who is abducted and sold into slavery. Northrup, 

imprisoned in a slave pen in DC prior to being sold, wrote that the pen where his captor held him 

was “within the very shadow of the Capitol.” It is generally believed he was held at the Yellow 

House, a private prison. 

Pinpointing the exact location of the Yellow House, owned by William Williams, is problematic. 

Depending on who is describing the buildings, the locations of the Yellow House, and another 

notorious slave pen, located on the property of Washington Robey’s Tavern, and operated by 

Joseph W. Neal and Company, are often confused. Foreign traveler’s accounts from the 1830s 

and 1840s often describe the Robey and Williams slave pens as being along the Mall. 

 

Journalists, historians, and other writers disagree on the location of the two slave pens. Some 

place William’s slave pen at the site of the FAA Headquarters (FOB10A), at 8th and B Streets 

(now Independence Ave), SW, and Robey’s Tavern at 7th and Maryland. Others believe the 

Yellow House sat where FOB10B is and Robey’s across the street on the grassy area in front of 

Capital Gallery. According to historian Kenneth J. Winkle in Lincoln’s Citadel, William 

Williams’ Yellow House sat south of the Smithsonian Institution along the National Mall. 

Robey’s Tavern, according to Winkle, sat directly across the street from the Yellow House. 

Jesse Holland, who wrote Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African-American History 

In and Round Washington, D.C., believes the slave markets were located between what are now 

the Department of Education and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. According to 

Holland, “directly in between where the Department of Education sits today and where the 

Smithsonian Air and Space Museum is now used to be a slave market called Robey’s Tavern.” 

He says the Yellow House sat just a block or so toward the Tidal Basin. 

According to the 2008 “Phase II 

Archaeological Investigation of 

the National Museum of African 

American History and Culture, 

Final Report,” the two best-known 

slave jails in Washington were 

Robey’s and Williams’ pens. The 

report, however, could not provide 

exact locations for the two pens. 

The reports authors cited Walter 

1836 Anti-slavery Broadside, “Slave Market of America,” 

showing the location of Robey’s and Neal’s prisons 
Clephane’s 1900 essay, “The Local Aspect of Slavery in the District of Columbia,” which 

located the two pens at the southeast corner of 8th and B streets, SW, and at the southeast corner 

of 7th and B streets, SW. The report, however, also cited a 1836 American Anti-Slavery Society 

account that placed Robey’s Prison along 9th Street, NW, between D and E Streets, and another 

prison at the corner of 7th Street, SE, and Maryland Avenue, which the Society referred to as 

Neal’s Prison, however, the latter location corresponds to the location described as Williams’ 

pen. 

In Solomon Northrup: 

The Complete Story of 

the Author of Twelve 

Years A Slave, 

Historians David 

Fiske, Clifford Brown 

Jr., write that 

according to tax 

records and other 

accounts, the Yellow 

House “was located in 

the 433 block of the 

city’s grid (which is 

faced by South B 

Street, now 

Independence Avenue, 

on its north; Seventh 

and Eighth Streets on its East and West; and Maryland Avenue on its South.” They place 

Robey’s Tavern a block east of Williams’s, situated on the east side of Seventh between B and C 

south. Three other slave pens were on the same street. 

Fiske and Brown admit the “precise location of the 

pen [Yellow House] on the block is difficult to pin 

down, although there is excellent evidence that the 

front entrance faced Seventh Street.” In researching 

old newspapers ads, they found an advertisement by 

Williams asking “sellers to stop by his ‘jail, on 

Seventh Street, between Center Market (where the 

National Archives now stands) and Long Bridge 

(originally a foot bridge connecting Maryland 

Avenue and 14th Street SW, with Alexandria), at the 

rough cast house that stands in the large garden 

surrounded by trees, on the west side of Seventh 

1850 grid map of Washington, DC,

433 block marked with an X

Long Bridge, circa 1865 
Street.’” Another ad “describes the establishment as ‘a yellow rough-cast house, the first on the 

right hand going from the market house to 

the steamboat wharf.’” A 1827 

Washington, DC, directory lists Roby’s 

tavern on the east side of 9th Street West 

between D and E Streets. 

One of the difficulties in identifying exact 

locations of the slave pens is that the city 

was young with a fairly small population 

and an evolving landscape of buildings and 

streets. Southwest Washington, at the time, 

for example, was lightly populated. As E.S. Abdy described Robey’s slave pen in 1833: 

One day I went to see the "slaves' pen” – a wretched hovel, "right 

against" the Capitol, from which it is distant about half a mile, with no 

house intervening. The outside alone is accessible to the eye of a visitor; 

what passes within being reserved for the exclusive observation of its 

owner, (a man of the name of Robey,) and his unfortunate victims. It is 

surrounded by a wooden paling fourteen or fifteen feet in height, with 

the posts outside to prevent escape and separated from the building by a 

space too narrow to admit of a free circulation of air. 

Regardless of where they were located, the 

presence of slave pens in the nation's 

capital captured the attention of 

abolitionists. Since the founding of the 

District of Columbia (the capital was 

moved from Philadelphia to DC on 

December 1, 1800), enslaved people had 

lived and worked in Washington. Because 

of its location between Maryland and 

Virginia, both slave states, the city became 

important in the domestic slave trade. In 

DC, slave dealers kept slaves in crowded 

pens and prisons prior to sale. Long lines 

of shackled slaves, or slave coffles, became a common site in Washington, as the slave traders 

moved their captives from one place to another. 

1863 painting of the steamboat wharf

Slave coffle in Washington, DC, circa 1862
In addition to the slave trade, Washington, DC, allowed slaves. The number of slaves in DC in 

1820 numbered approximately 6,400. The typical slave worked in some form of domestic 

service, although some helped to construct buildings in the growing city, including the Capitol. 

By 1860, the numbers of slaves had decreased to about 3,100. The United States Congress had 

abolished the slave trade, but not slavery, in the District of Columbia on September 20, 1850, as 

part of the legislative package called the Compromise of 1850. Slavery continued to exist in 

Washington, however, until April 16, 1862. On that day, President Lincoln signed legislation 

freeing the 3,000 African Americans bound by the District's slave code. 

For additional information on 

slavery and the slave trade in 

Washington, DC, see 

http://www.archives.gov/publi

cations/prologue/2010/spring/

dcslavery.html. 

1836 Abolitionist placard denouncing the DC slave trade