On this site MAY 1st 1865 Memorial Day was started. first called Decoration Day .
formally a race track turned concentration camp for UNION soldiers during the civil war May 1865 The holiday we know as
at least 257 union soldiers died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a MASS grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight FORMERLY ENSLAVED BLACK MEN went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and The nation never saw before.