Hampton Park, at 61 acres, is Charleston’s largest park. By contrast, New York City’s Central Park spans 843 acres, and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park covers 1,017 acres.
The land was originally granted by King Charles II to colonist Joseph Dalton, who arrived on one of the first ships to reach the Carolina colony in April 1670. By 1769, the property had passed to planter John Gibbes, who consolidated it into a 232-acre estate called Orange Grove Plantation. During the Revolutionary War, the British seized the land, burned Gibbes’ house and used the property as a staging area during their 42-day siege of Charleston in 1780.
In August 1791, the South Carolina Jockey Club purchased a portion of the property to build the Washington Race Course, a one-mile oval track that operated from 1792 to 1882. The course hosted Race Week each February, which became the height of Charleston’s social season, featuring thoroughbred racing, banquets and formal balls. Among the founders was Wade Hampton, father of Wade Hampton III, for whom the park would later be named.
During the Civil War, Confederate forces converted the racecourse into an outdoor prison camp, where Union soldiers died in harsh conditions and were buried in makeshift graves within the track’s infield. On May 1, 1865 — shortly after the war’s end — about 10,000 Black Charlestonians, most of them formerly enslaved, marched through the racecourse in a solemn procession to honor the Union dead and rebury them. It is considered one of the earliest Memorial Day observances in the United States. By 1871, the soldiers’ remains had been reinterred at national cemeteries in Beaufort and Florence.
In 1901-02, the park hosted the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition, an international trade show that attracted nearly 675,000 attendees. President Theodore Roosevelt visited the exposition on April 9, 1902. New York architect Bradford L. Gilbert designed a temporary “Ivory City” of more than 20 cream-colored, Spanish Renaissance-style buildings. Inspired by earlier world’s fairs in Atlanta, New Orleans and Nashville, the exposition aimed to stimulate trade through Charleston’s harbor, particularly with the Caribbean and Latin America, and ran from December 1901 to May 1902.
A 320-foot-long Cotton Palace, built by enslaved labor to commemorate pre-Civil War economic prosperity, was among several themed structures highlighting commerce and agriculture. Exhibits also included a midway carnival, a 400-foot-long painting of the Battle of Manassas and the Liberty Bell, on loan from Pennsylvania. Poor weather and limited funding ultimately prevented the exposition from covering its costs, drawing about one-third of the attendance organizers had projected.
The city later purchased the land for $32,500 and built Hampton Park on the eastern portion of the grounds, where the exposition bandstand still stands. In the 1910s, the remaining land was used for the new Citadel campus. The City of Charleston named the park after Confederate Gen. Wade Hampton III, a prominent and controversial figure in 19th-century South Carolina. After the Civil War, Hampton became a leading voice of the Lost Cause movement.
The city hired the New York landscape architecture firm Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot to redesign the grounds. John Charles Olmsted developed a plan following his 1906 visit, planting hundreds of live oaks for shade along with thousands of ornamental shrubs and flowers.
From 1932 to 1975, the park housed a zoo featuring animals donated by Archer Huntington from Brookgreen Gardens, including deer, buffalo, bears and a lion named Leo. The zoo closed in 1975, and the remaining animals were transferred to Charles Towne Landing. Today, the park features ornamental gardens, walking trails, ponds, a dog park and the one-mile Mary Murray Drive, which closely follows the outline of the original racecourse.
More recently, on June 14, 2025, the park hosted a “No Kings” demonstration that drew an estimated 1,400 people protesting President Donald Trump and his administration’s policies.