Episode 290: Charleston’s Suburban Racecourse and Slave Auction Site

Charleston Time Machine

Just beyond the boundaries of urban Charleston, a hundred-acre pasture straddling modern Meeting Street hosted a variety of public events during the second half of the eighteenth century. Crowds flocked to Newmarket, as the site was called, to toll their livestock, to watch racehorses traverse a one-mile oval, to witness the auction of large gangs of enslaved people, and to see Native American visitors camping beyond the pale of South Carolina’s colonial capital. In this episode of the Charleston Time Machine, we’ll explore the tangled history of one of the community’s earliest and least-remembered suburbs.