In the last year of the Civil War, Confederates turned the Washington Race Course, the South Carolina Jockey Club's track since 1835, into an open-air prison for captured Union soldiers. At least 257 of them died there of exposure and disease and were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. After Confederate troops left Charleston, Black workmen, many of them formerly enslaved, dug up the remains, gave each soldier a proper grave and built a whitewashed fence around the new cemetery, with an arch reading Martyrs of the Race Course. On 1 May 1865 as many as 10,000 people, most of them freed Black Charlestonians, marched there to dedicate it, about 3,000 Black schoolchildren among them carrying flowers.
The children sang John Brown's Body, and members of the 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments marched around the graves. The historian David Blight came across the story in 1996 in a file labelled First Decoration Day among Union veterans' papers at Harvard's Houghton Library, then found reports in the New York Tribune and the Charleston Courier, and argued in his 2001 book Race and Reunion that this was the first Memorial Day. Other historians dispute the claim, and Blight found no proof that the ceremony shaped the national holiday.
The graves lay near the present corner of Tenth Avenue and Mary Murray Drive. By 1871 the cemetery had been neglected, and the remains were moved to the Beaufort and Florence National Cemeteries. The track's ground is now Hampton Park.
Getting there
32.8002, -79.9583
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