Richmond Slave Trail

Last Tuesday (April 9), I joined the group for the Old Dominion AT Club for another walk downtown, this time to cover part of the Richmond Slave Trail.  For a description of the entire trail, go to this older blog post.

For this hike, we focused on the part of the trail along the James River.  By the way, the expression "sold down the river?"  The river is the James, and the place was here.  Human beings in Virginia were sold by their owners to plantations way down south for many reasons - to earn a quick buck, because they were no longer needed, to get rid of a child of the plantation owner - along with their mother - to punish someone who was not fully cooperating.  Hard to believe, but all true.

Here is our track, about 5.4 miles.  To do the route, we did part of the same trail twice, more or less.  We started and ended at the circle (left) and followed the direction indicated by the arrows - across the Potterfield Bridge, down the Canal Walk, across the Mayo Bridge, down the Slave Trail to the site of the Manchester Docks, reversing this section a bit closer to the river, and back to the start on the Flood Wall Trail.

Here are some pictures from the hike:

Richmond from the Potterfield Bridge:

Black vultures - we saw dozens of these large birds - on a rocky island in the river.

Much of the trail is urban, but this part was more of a path through woods.

Virginia bluebells.

View of the city from the Flood Wall trail, on which we hiked to get back to the starting point.

History is fascinating to me.  In this case, it is also tragic and awful.  The terrible events that the Richmond Slave Trail remembers actually happened, right here in the Land of the Free.  Best that we not forget about it.