Horatio J. Eden, who was imprisoned in Forrest's jail with his mother and siblings in the 1850s, described the building as having "a kind of square stockade of high boards with two-room
negro houses around, say, three sides of it and high board fence too high to be scaled on the other side or sides...when an auction was held or buyers came, we were brought out and paraded two by two around a circular brick walk in the center of the stockade. The buyers would stand near by and inspect us as we went by, stop us and examine us." In spring 1864, after the
massacre at Fort Pillow, an article about Forrest's slave-trading business appeared in many Northern papers. This allowed him to increase his holding capacity from a maximum of 300 slaves to a maximum of 500. The
New York Times reported that the Forrest, Jones & Co. negro mart building in Memphis had both collapsed and then caught fire; two people died. The firm's
bills of sale for people, "amounting in the aggregate to " were salvaged. In August 1862, after all the Forrest brothers (except for disabled
Mexican–American War veteran
John N. Forrest) had all gone off to fight for the Confederacy, their former slave pen became a police station and Memphis city jail. At that time the
Daily Union Appeal described it as "a filthy den, and would make any decent man sick to be there one night." ==Historical marker==