Newmarket: Charleston’s Suburban Racecourse and Slave Auction Site

Just beyond the boundaries of urban Charleston, a hundred-acre pasture straddling Meeting Street hosted a variety of events during the second half of the eighteenth century. Crowds of people flocked to the suburban site called Newmarket to toll their livestock, to watch galloping racehorses, to witness auctions of enslaved people, and to see Native Americans and soldiers camping beyond the pale of South Carolina’s colonial capital. In today’s Time Machine, we’ll explore the tangled history of one of the community’s least-remembered cultural sites.

The land in question was once part of a larger tract containing nearly 300 acres, which South Carolina’s proprietary government assigned in 1672 to Joseph Dalton, the English colony’s first provincial secretary. Dalton’s land stretched across the breadth of the Charleston Peninsula between the rivers Ashley and Cooper, extending from modern Line Street northwardly to a point roughly commensurate with modern Moultrie Street. The property changed hands several times during the final decades of the seventeenth century, during which the owners subdivided the tract into two nearly equal parts—one half lying to the west of the modern King Street, and the other half lying to the east of that historic highway. In January 1700, South Carolina Governor Joseph Blake purchased the eastern half of Dalton’s grant, containing approximately 152 acres of high land lying one mile north of Charleston’s original town northern boundary (i.e., Beaufain Street).

Governor Blake died several months after purchasing this suburban acreage, however, and likely never resided here. Once his son, also named Joseph Blake (1700–1751), reached his majority and inherited the property, he divided his time between a grand residence within the colonial capital and several large plantations spread across the rural Lowcountry. Junior’s son and heir, Daniel Blake (1731–1780), followed the same affluent lifestyle funded by the forced labor of enslaved people growing rice for export to Europe. After the American Revolution, the heirs of Daniel Blake chose to reside in England.[1]

Rather than occupying and developing this suburban tract personally, the absentee heirs of Governor Blake and their local agents leased it to a succession of resident proprietors over a period of nearly a century and a half. In 1846, the distantly-related Blake heirs, most of whom resided abroad, agreed to subdivide and sell the property then known locally as “the Blake Lands.” Private development in this sparsely-populated area commenced after the Civil War and continued, albeit slowly, into the twentieth century. Today, few vestiges of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries survive on a very modern landscape that currently lacks a proper neighborhood name.

The 150-odd acres formerly known as the Blake Lands have hosted a great deal of human and animal activity since the early 1670s, when the Etiwan people ceded the peninsula to English settlers. The most significant chapter in its long history unfolded during the second half of the eighteenth century, a vibrant and tumultuous era in which the colony of South Carolina and its capital town matured, rebelled, and severed the political ties binding them to Great Britain. To see the Blake Lands through the eyes of Carolinians alive during the mid-to-late 1700s, both the enslaved Black majority and the free white minority, let’s begin anew and visualize a landscape rather different from the present view.

The Blake Lands encompassed a swath of high land and a large quantity of marshland on the peninsula once called Oyster Point, bounded to the east by the Cooper River, to the west by an old Native American trail called the “Broad Path” (now King Street), to the south by the late-colonial village of Hampstead, and to the north by the extinct village of Rumney. The neighborhood’s eastern and western boundaries are fairly obvious, but its southern and northern boundaries are more obscure. To trace its southern edge, imagine walking eastward along Line Street from King Street to Aiken Street, where you turn northward and continue to Cooper Street, then turn eastward and continue towards the present footpath leading to the Ravenel Bridge. Coincidentally, East Bay Street becomes Morrison Drive at the same point where Hampstead ends and the Blake Lands commence. The northeastern boundary between the Blake Lands and the village of Rumney lies just north of Huger Street, within the marshes of Newmarket Creek that flows directly beneath the elevated roadway linking I-26 to the Ravenel Bridge. The historic Enston Homes on upper King Street, a series of red-brick cottages largely built during the late nineteenth century, occupy the northwestern-most corner of the Blake Lands.

Within this swath of 150-odd acres, members of the eighteenth-century Blake family identified three distinct parcels that they leased to separate parties over the decades. The highest and driest acreage stood near the center of the tract, directly east of modern Race Street and straddling both sides of modern Harris Street. Here a roughly square parcel of approximately 104 acres on the east side of the Broad Path became known as Newmarket Plantation (also spelled “New-Market”), or simply Newmarket. At the soggy southern edge of the Blake Lands, the owners designated a separate, nameless parcel containing thirty-odd acres of marshland on the south side of modern Lee Street, where a bold stream called Vardell’s Creek once flowed under the present Grace Bridge Street and several blocks of new, flood-prone apartments. A third parcel located at the neighborhood’s northern boundary encompassed Newmarket Creek and twenty-odd acres of marshland on the north side of modern Huger Street.[2]

How or when the central portion of the Blake Lands acquired the name “Newmarket” is a mystery. None of the early owners left any written record explaining the site’s nomenclature. With some confidence, however, we can speculate that the property’s name was probably inspired by the famous English equestrian ground called Newmarket Racecourse in the County of Suffolk, fifty-odd miles northeast of London. That Mecca of equestrian sport, formally laid out in the 1630s, witnessed a burst of cultural activity after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the advent of royal patronage that continued well into the eighteenth century. The affluent members of the English Blake family, though somewhat forgotten in modern South Carolina, must have been amply familiar with the celebrated annual migrations of fashionable aristocracy and gentry to witness the king’s sport at Newmarket.

Back in eighteenth-century Charleston, cultural activities on the grounds of the Blake family’s Newmarket Plantation included crowds of people and animals like those seen at the more famous Suffolk racecourse, but with far less pageantry. The family evidently built one or more residential and/or commercial structures on the property during the early 1700s, but no details relative to their character or location survive. Owing to the paucity of Blake family records from that distant era, the extant newspapers of colonial-era Charleston, which commenced in January 1732, constitute the principal source of historical data related to Newmarket Plantation. In August of that year, for example, a pair of cabinetmakers (evidently tenants of the Blake family) advertised the sale of bespoke furniture at their workshop “at New-Market Plantation, about a mile from Charlestown.”[3] One month later, an anonymous notice informed “all persons who keep cows in Charlestown, that 40 head of cows, and no more, will be taken in to pasture at New-Market Plantation for half a crown a head per week.”[4] The absence of a public common in the original plan of urban Charleston obliged residents to hire pasturage outside the town, and numerous advertisements published over the remainder of the eighteenth century mention cows and horses tolled at Newmarket. Another advertisement published in late September 1732 provides the earliest evidence of what would eventually become a common sight within the suburban pasture. Local merchant George Austin invited the public to inspect “ten choice Negroes, lately imported in the ship Edward [from Barbados]; to be seen at Mr. Edwin Steed’s plantation (the place of sale) commonly known by the name of Newmarket Plantation.” The human auction was scheduled for October 11th, meaning that the enslaved people must have camped for nearly two weeks within some unknown structure, temporary or permanent, on the suburban grounds that Edwin Steed evidently leased from the Blake family.[5]

A more robust picture of life at Newmarket emerges from the Charleston newspapers published during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Thomas Nightingale, a saddle-maker and former packhorse trader to the Cherokee Nation, acquired a lease of the hundred-acre Blake pasture by the summer of 1750 and was likely the driving force behind its expanding public profile.[6] During Nightingale’s tenure spanning nearly twenty years, the property included a “house” or tavern that served as both a family residence for Tom, his wife Sarah, and their children, and as a popular commercial stand or house of entertainment. Nearby stood several outbuildings, likely including one or more stables, chair or coach houses, kitchen, and laundry structures that also sheltered a small staff of enslaved servants who shouldered the bulk of the work in the big house and in the pasture.[7] Beyond this small cluster of human habitation covering one or two acres, the remainder of the hundred-acre plantation resembled a pastorale savanna—a grassy and relatively flat terrain from which early residents had removed most of the natural vegetation and trees. Advertisements published during Nightingale’s era and beyond suggest that their residential complex stood some distance to the east of the Broad Path (now King Street), requiring patrons to open a gate and stroll or ride down a path to reach the rustic tavern. Enclosed by a wooden fence to the west and brackish marshes to the north, south, and east, the nearly-square property provided a secure enclosure for tranquil cows and horses belonging to town folk residing a mile down the road. Within this bucolic colonial setting, veteran horseman Thomas Nightingale organized or helped to organize the first sustained tradition of equestrian sport in South Carolina—the Newmarket Races.

The annual series of Newmarket Races were a fixture of Charleston’s social calendar from 1755 to the advent of the American Revolution, but they were not unprecedented. The earliest known record of a horse race in South Carolina dates from the late winter of 1735, when the local newspaper announced a contest between four horses at the Bowling Green pasture of Captain George Anson (now part of Ansonborough). That event might not have been the first such contest at the captain’s pasture, just as the first advertised horse race at the Quarter House in modern North Charleston, staged in February 1736, likely represented the public debut of private equestrian events that commenced years earlier.[8] Furthermore, advertisements published in 1743 point to the brief existence of a racecourse called Newmarket near the village of Goose Creek.[9] Two years later, in the late autumn of 1745, one Thomas Butler advertised an equestrian event at his “race ground on Charles Town Neck,” which he described as being “an exact mile round, twenty feet wide,” and which likely formed part of the rented Blake lands.[10] Following the 1748 conclusion of a long conflict with Spain and France called the War of Jenkins’ Ear, Charleston’s weekly newspapers advertised a growing number of horse races taking place at rural courses spread across the Lowcountry from Beaufort to Georgetown. The most enduring of the new race tracks was the suburban Newmarket parcel of the Blake Lands, where a well-publicized series of annual events commenced in the spring of 1755.[11]

The secure pasture managed by Thomas Nightingale possessed several attractive features that evidently inspired local sporting enthusiasts to invest their time and money. The site’s primary asset was likely its broad and relatively flat terrain, denuded of most of its natural vegetation by the daily cooking fires of earlier generations. Here Nightingale and his allies oversaw the labors of unfree men and women who maintained a smooth, oval-shaped course at least twenty feet wide—likely the same track mentioned years earlier by Thomas Butler. By compressing the distance of one statute mile into the shape of an oval covering approximately 52 acres, the proprietors improved the site’s marketability and reserved ample space for ongoing residential and commercial operations. George Anson’s Bowling Green racecourse, by comparison, was likely a quarter-mile oval centered around the modern intersection of Meeting and George Streets. Contemporary sources noted that the rural racecourse at the Quarter House, six miles up the Broad Path from urban Charleston, featured a half-mile oval during its heyday.[12] In contrast, Newmarket’s broad pasture, just a mile from the capital, offered sufficient space for an oval one mile in circumference, oriented on a roughly east-west axis.

If you’re trying to visualize that racecourse on the present landscape, imagine a rectangle measuring roughly 1,100 feet by 2,100 feet, within which the Newmarket oval occupied most of the ground between modern Stuart Street and Lee Street (to the north and south, respectively), stretching from a western point near modern H Street to an eastern limit near the present lines of America Street. The entrance gate to eighteenth-century Newmarket Plantation stood on the east side of the country road now called King Street, opposite the entrance to modern Race Street. The center point of the ovular course, a spot likely crowded with spectators and enslaved servants on festive race days, stood approximately within the present intersection of Harris and Meeting Streets, the latter of which did not exist beyond modern Calhoun Street until 1785. The buildings occupied by members of the Nightingale family and their successors might have stood near the center of the track, or perhaps closer to plantation’s principal entrance fronting King Street.

A festive week-long series of races or “heats” at Nightingale’s suburban plantation commenced in mid-April 1755 and remained a fixture of the local social calendar during successive Februarys until 1774, when political tensions with Britain dampened Charleston’s appetite for lighthearted recreation.[13] A narration of the published details of the tournaments of that era, replete with sporting drama and curious local color, would fill a small book that we’ll leave to a future occasion. For the present, I’d like to turn the conversation towards the experiences of other visitors—men, women, and children whose hours at Newmarket were far less pleasurable.

The resident proprietors of the rented Blake lands and their enslaved servants were accustomed to seeing visitors traverse the property. Those frequenting the Newmarket public house, exercising imported thoroughbreds around the oval course, and participating in the festive annual races were generally white men of European stock, but such visitors occasionally brought their respective wives, children, and enslaved attendants. The plantation’s small resident population also witnessed the less frequent but more sustained visits of Native American guests. In the summer of 1757, for example, two separate groups of “Indians” representing the Chickasaw and Creek (Muscogee) people, respectively, camped for some weeks at Newmarket pasture while consulting with provincial officials in the capital. Shortly after their departure, Thomas Nightingale submitted invoices to the South Carolina General Assembly, seeking compensation for unspecified charges related to hospitality his family extended to the recent Native Americans on behalf of His Majesty’s government.[14] The surviving documentary evidence of this event, rendered in pounds, shillings, and pence, illuminates an intriguing intersection of disparate cultures. As such, it represents just one instance of a periodic scenario that occurred numerous times before the American Revolution. Not all of the Native American delegations visiting the colonial capital of South Carolina camped within the boundaries of Newmarket Plantation, but the site’s location, amenities, and political connections probably rendered it a preferred location.

During his earlier career as a packhorse trader to the Cherokee Nation, Thomas Nightingale and his itinerate colleagues might have camped periodically at Newmarket, resting before and after long commercial treks between Charleston and the distant Cherokee mountains. The repeated use of Joseph and Daniel Blake’s pasture as a sanctuary for transient visitors, specifically for those accustomed to an outdoor lifestyle, established a precedent for the hospitality extended to the Anglo-American soldiers forming part of the British 60th Regiment of Foot. A large detachment of the so-called Royal American Regiment, perhaps numbering 400 men, camped at Newmarket Plantation during the summer, autumn, and winter of 1757 because the capital town could not provide sufficient accommodations. While camping Red Coats excavated the broad foundations of a fortified Horn Work to guard the town’s northern boundary (now part of Marion Square) that winter, the provincial government completed a large range of new barracks that later became the cradle of the College of Charleston. In the spring of 1758, after the departure of the visiting regiment, Sarah Nightingale received the sum of £75 South Carolina currency from the provincial government, “for damages sustained by the Royal American’s encampment in her pasture.”[15]

During the 1750s and 1760s, scores of references in local newspapers demonstrate that the Nightingale name was interchangeable with that of Newmarket. Published notices of various activities at the Blake-owned plantation routinely identified the venue only by the proprietor’s surname, a practice that might confuse readers unfamiliar with the site’s history. This convention, which continued with the names of successive proprietors during the remainder of the eighteenth century, has long obscured the darkest chapter in the history of Newmarket Plantation. During the second half of the eighteenth century, primarily between 1758 and 1779, the popular race ground hosted scores of public slave sales, ranging in size from a half-dozen individuals to as many as 220 men, women, and children of African descent.[16]

A relatively small proportion of these late-colonial events featured people recently imported from Africa or the Caribbean, like the aforementioned sale advertised by George Austin in 1732. The majority of the slave auctions held at Newmarket featured what was commonly described in the local press as a “gang” of “Negroes,” meaning the entire enslaved population of a working plantation, people who were marched over land or perhaps transported by boat from their rural homes to the suburban racecourse for the purpose of sale. Bankruptcies, lawsuits, and estate liquidations forced most of these labor disruptions and inspired motivated sellers to transport their merchandize to the capital in the hopes of maximizing profits. The pasture at Newmarket provided ample ground for temporary residents who perhaps slept in improvised tents or shelters, cooked over campfires, and washed in the nearby creeks. Their captive presence on the outskirts of Charleston preserved order within the crowded capital and facilitated the visits of prospective buyers who could ride up King Street to inspect the chattel property before the day of sale.

Beginning with an advertised trickle of auctions in the late 1750s, the growing frequency and volume of slave sales at Newmarket induced proprietor Thomas Nightingale to enact several changes in policy. In March 1762, he notified “all persons who for the future intend to sell Negroes at my house, that they must pay me five shillings for each negro; and gentlemen who want dinner on the days of sale, are desired to give timely notice, otherwise no provision will be made.” By insisting that “no negroes will be lodged” in his house or outbuildings, Nightingale confirmed that the enslaved people awaiting sale at the racecourse were obliged to camp in some manner outside under the stars.[17]

The several illustrations accompanying this text represent just a small sample of the numerous newspaper advertisements for slave auctions held at Newmarket, which involved several thousands of individuals over the years. The sales of enslaved humans, the tolling and sales of animal livestock, and the annual races continued long after the death of Thomas Nightingale in November 1769.[18] A local merchant named Joseph Levy assumed the lease of Newmarket Plantation immediately thereafter and continued in residence until his retirement in August 1772.[19] James Strickland, formerly a “waiter at Mr. Holliday’s Tavern” on East Bay Street, then managed the property until sometime in the autumn of 1779, the precise date of his removal now obscured by the fog of war.[20] One Mrs. Howe, evidently a widow, was identified as the proprietor of Newmarket at the end of 1779, but the duration of her tenure is unclear.[21] The venerable public house, residence, outbuildings, and the rest of the site’s infrastructure were probably leveled during the British siege of urban Charleston that commenced in April 1780 and concluded with a mass surrender outside the Horn Work on the twelfth of May.

Following the British evacuation of Charleston in December 1782 and the formal conclusion of the American Revolution in the spring of 1783, citizens hungry for peaceful diversions staged a late-season round of horse racing at Newmarket that April. Agents of the absentee Blake family advertised the tract for lease in September of the same year. John Creighton, formerly associated with the Quarter House tavern, acquired the Newmarket lease that autumn and continued in residence for nearly a decade. Under his proprietorship, the earlier pattern of annual races recommenced in the late winter of 1784 and continued in several successive years.[22]

Auction sales of real and chattel property at Newmarket also recommenced after the war, but such events never again matched the frequency and scale of those held in the decades preceding the Revolution. The site’s cultural vitality suffered another blow in 1785, when a statute ratified by the state General Assembly authorized the northward extension of Meeting Street. From its colonial-era terminus at Boundary Street (now Calhoun Street), workers carved a linear track approximately seventy feet wide straight through a patchwork of private property to a point of intersection with the old Broad Path (King Street), near modern Cunnington Street. A rare map depicting the public road from urban Charleston to rural Watboo Plantation, published in 1787, demonstrates that the extension of Meeting Street bisected the old racecourse at Newmarket, and also depicts a public house or tavern standing at what is now the northeast corner of Harris and Meeting Streets. Whether that structure represented a post-war addition to the property or the restoration of a colonial edifice is a question not easily answered today.[23]

The extension of Meeting Street across the old race grounds at Newmarket did not immediately destroy the site’s utility for equestrian sport, but it probably inspired local enthusiasts to consider a change of venue. The annual races at Newmarket continued in 1786, 1787, and 1788 while human and animal traffic on the new Meeting Street Road, as it was called, steadily increased. By 1789, local investors began planning a new race course in a more northerly suburb, farther removed from traffic and the encroaching development of post-war Charleston. The final advertised races at Newmarket took place in March 1791. In February 1792, one month after the death of Newmarket proprietor John Creighton, the ongoing tradition of Charleston’s annual races week officially migrated to a new, northward location called Washington Racecourse (now part of Hampton Park).[24]

The abandonment of the mile-long race track at Newmarket signaled the end of an era for the neighborhood, but life on the Blake Lands changed little for another half-century. A man named Robert Lees briefly advertised as the proprietor of the plantation’s public house in the spring of 1792, but was replaced by Henry Timrod by August of the same year. Timrod’s removal to the countryside in June 1794 provided an opening for one Thomas Tims (also spelled Timms), whose management of Newmarket continued into the early 1800s. Under a continuing series of antebellum proprietors, cultural activities within the bounds of the old suburban plantation gradually diminished as residential and commercial development crept northward and railroad lines traversed the Blake property during the first half of the nineteenth century. A court-ordered settlement among the descendants of Governor Joseph Blake, ratified in 1846, divided the largely vacant tract of 150-odd acres of highland and its adjacent marshes into twenty large parcels for sale to local investors.[25]

The colonial history of Newmarket Plantation was a distant memory among older Charlestonians who witnessed the commencement of the American Civil War in 1861. Few of the locals and newcomers who swelled the city’s population during the period of Reconstruction and beyond recalled the site’s prominent role in the community’s earlier generations. Empowered by ready access to digitized records and a desire to construct a more inclusive narrative of Charleston’s long history, twenty-first-century residents can reach back in time to rediscover and reassess the cultural significance of this forgotten plantation landscape. Newmarket might have been on the periphery of the colonial capital, but the diverse layers of its early history form an important and colorful chapter in the big picture of modern Charleston.

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