The land that has been developed as Angola Penitentiary was purchased in the 1830s from Francis Rout as four contiguous plantations by Isaac Franklin. He was a planter and slave trader, co-owner of the profitable slave trading firm Franklin and Armfield, of Alexandria, Virginia and Natchez, Mississippi. After his death in 1846, Franklin’s widow, by then known as Adelicia Cheatham, joined these plantations: Panola, Belle View, Killarney, and Angola, when she sold them all in 1880 to Samuel Lawrence James, the former CSA officer. The Angola plantation was named for the country in Africa from which many of its slaves had come.[15] It contained a building called the Old Slave Quarters.