The Yellow House was the slave jail of the Williams brothers (Thomas Williams and William H. Williams), located at 7th Street and Maryland Avenue Southwest in Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States. In 1838, William H. Williams directed people wishing to buy or sell slaves to his jail "on 7th street the first house south of the market bridge on the west side".
The Williams' slave-trading business was apparently "large and well-known to traders in Richmond and New Orleans." The three-story building was made of brick covered in yellow-painted plaster and served as a navigation landmark for visitors to the city: "In an era before the memorials to Washington or Jefferson (much less the yet-unknown Lincoln) had been erected, D.C. travelers oriented themselves based on the Yellow House, which stood as a prominent landmark within the nation's capital."
In 1843 a column in The Liberator referenced it: "If ever you have been to Washington you have probably noticed a large yellow house which stands about a mile from the avenue near the PotomacâÂÂThat is the slave prison. It is owned by a celebrated slave trader, who has made a large fortune by following his hellish traffic. Slaves are not sold openly at public auction in this district so frequent as formerly. The traffic is carried on in secret. Thus public opinion begins to be felt even in the slave regions."
There are at least two contemporary descriptions of the jail. One is from an account of attempting to rescue a man who had been kidnapped into slavery in 1848:
The building was deserted and derelict in 1853 when a news writer from Syracuse reported "I noticed that Williamson's slave pen had been dismantled, proparatory either to a removal or reconstruction of the building, it is situated in a lonely, though pleasant spot. An air of sorrow pervades it as though the groans, the sighs, and blood of its victims were still rising from its cells, and weighing down the atmosphere with their burden of grief."
The Yellow House was located across from where the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden stands today. The private prison was in use as a waystation of the interstate slave trade from 1836 to 1850. During his one term in the U.S. Congress, Abraham Lincoln recorded that he could see the building from the U.S. Capitol. A few years earlier, Solomon Northrup, a victim of kidnapping into slavery, could see the Capitol from his cell in the Williams' dungeon.