Unearthing the Weeping Time: Savannah's Ten Broeck Race Course
and 1859 Slave Sale |Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson, Michael Page, and
Kyle Thayer, Superimposition: Re-imaged Ten Broeck Race Course
on 2007 aerial photo of site, looking northeast, Savannah,
Georgia, 2010.| In 1859, one of the largest slave sales in U.S.
history took place at the Ten Broeck Race Course, now an
obscured landscape, on the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia. 436
enslaved persons from the Butler plantations near Darien were
sold in an event remembered as "The Weeping Time." Despite the
prevalence of historic monuments in the U.S. South, memorials to
slavery are rare or recent arrivals. Not until 2008 did the city
of Savannah and the Georgia Historical Society place a marker
near the site of the sale. In this essay, Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson
examines how this once hidden landscape can be re-imagined into
Savannah's historic memory through archival research, oral
history, physical observations of the landscape, and the art of
mapmaking. The blades of gr