Raleigh, North Carolina: Over 130 enslaved African American men built and maintained the North Carolina State Capitol between 1833 and 1865.

These men were primarily enslaved locally in Raleigh, and were hired out to the Capitol by their enslavers.
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Many worked on the Capitol’s construction in the 1830s, either as laborers at the construction site or as quarry hands at the nearby State Quarry.

Construction work required the skilled labor of stonemasons, brick makers, quarrymen, carpenters, plaster workers, and general laborers, and enslaved African Americans forced labor made up a significant portion of the workers.

Several individuals who worked at the Capitol survived to gain emancipation - including Friday Jones, Handy Lockhart, Junius Brickle, and Boston Finch.

In several cases, documents refer to enslaved laborers at the Capitol but do not record their names – we remember these individuals with “Unnamed” in the list of names below.

All stories are unique, but taken together they illustrate the complexities of slavery in a community. Some stories include both slavery and Emancipation.