Shockoe Institute breaks ground on $11M Main Street Station venue, part of larger Shockoe Project

by Jackie DiBartolomeo

The Shockoe Institute hosted a ceremonial groundbreaking for its Main Street Station center on Thursday. (Photos by Jackie DiBartolomeo)

A crowd gathered on the first floor of Main Street Station Thursday morning for the ceremonial groundbreaking of the Shockoe Institute, a 12,000-square-foot educational and interpretive center that will be part of the larger Shockoe Project slavery memorial campus in Shockoe Bottom.

Shockoe Institute President and CEO Marland Buckner was joined by the likes of Mayor Danny Avula, City Council President Cynthia Newbille and more to sign a steel beam that will go into the construction of the new venue.

The center will be divided into two sections: a 10,000-square-foot exhibition space that will explore the evolution of racial slavery in Virginia and the U.S. and a lab space that will host programming such as lectures and book talks.

To be housed on the northern-end ground floor of the Train Shed at Main Street Station, the center is funded by a grant from the New York City-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s monuments project.

“It was the Mellon Foundation’s grant of $11 million that allows this institute to be the largest privately funded effort dedicated to understanding slavery, the domestic slave trade in Richmond and the struggle to expand human freedom,” Buckner said at the event.

Mayor Danny Avula spoke at the institute groundbreaking.

The groundbreaking took place on the 160th anniversary of Emancipation Day in Richmond, when Union forces took control of the city in 1865.

Avula praised both the “unprecedented gift” of the Mellon Foundation grant and the Shockoe Institute for its plans to share the story of slavery in Richmond.

“Now, to see that come together in something like the Shockoe Institute that will be a place that will teach folks, that will engage folks and that will make sure people have the opportunity to wrestle with our history … I couldn’t be prouder to have this in our city,” Avula said at the event.

The day’s events also included a musical performance from Shockoe Institute founding artistic director and musician Leyla McCalla, who performed “Heart of Gold,” a song adapted from Langston Hughes’ poetry, as she played her cello.

The City of Richmond announced in February it had chosen Newport News contractor Team Henry Enterprises to lead the construction of the interpretive center. Richmond architecture firm Baskervill is handling the design.

Team Henry, led by president and CEO Devon Henry, has been involved in numerous Richmond-area projects and was the contractor hired to remove several Confederate statues, including the Stonewall Jackson statue on Monument Avenue, over several years starting in 2020.

Henry said at the groundbreaking he was excited for Team Henry to be a part of bringing the Shockoe Institute vision to life for Richmonders.

“For us to have the opportunity to be the contractor that comes in and brings this type of project to life, it gives me purpose,” Henry told BizSense.

Marland Buckner welcomed guests to the institute’s groundbreaking.

The interpretive center build-out is an initial component of the greater Shockoe Project, a relaunching of the previously named Enslaved African Heritage Campus, and later, the Shockoe Bottom Heritage Campus. The long-term project aims to transform 10 acres of Shockoe Bottom into a campus that reckons with the history of slavery in Richmond.

The Main Street Station interpretive center will serve as a starting point for the project, leading into other components, such as a long-planned 62,000-square-foot slavery museum, burial ground memorials and other commemorative sites, including a 21,000-square-foot building commemorating the Lumpkin’s Slave Jail/Devil’s Half Acre site.

Other facets include improvements to the Richmond Slave Trail and the Winfree Cottage, an enslaved woman’s home that is planned to be moved from Shockoe Bottom back to its original location in Manchester.

The Shockoe Institute at Main Street Station is slated to open its doors by this time next year, Buckner said at the event. The city’s goal is to complete the Shockoe Project by 2037, commemorating Richmond’s 300th birthday.