The Ten Broeck Race Course, on the west side of Savannah two and a half to three miles from the old city, was the scene of the Weeping Time: on 2 and 3 March 1859, 436 enslaved men, women and children from Pierce Mease Butler's plantations near Darien were put up for sale there to pay his debts, and 429 were sold. They were kept in the course's horse stalls before the auction, and the sale was held at the grandstand. The journalist Mortimer Thomson, writing as Doesticks, described a long room there about a hundred feet by twenty, where people waited with their belongings to be called to the block. It rained hard on both days, and the sale raised $303,850. Most of the people sold were rice and cotton field hands; others were coopers, carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths and cooks.
Racing there probably goes back to the 1790s. Charles A. L. Lamar, president of the Savannah Jockey Club and in 1859 indicted over the slave ship Wanderer, bought the track by a deed dated 31 January 1857. It was already being advertised as the Ten Broeck course that January, most likely after the New York horseman Richard Ten Broeck. A plat of 1907 already calls it the old race course.
Interstate 516 was later built through the site. In 2010 the landscape architect Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson placed the grandstand on a lumber yard west of the interstate, about a quarter mile southwest of the 2008 Georgia Historical Society marker at Augusta Avenue and Dunn Street. In 2022 Dixie Plywood sold land on the old course to IMC Logistics for about $30 million.
Getting there
32.0868, -81.1304
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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