On March 2-3, 1859, roughly 436 enslaved men, women, and children from Pierce Mease Butler's Georgia plantations were sold at the Ten Broeck Race Course outside Savannah to satisfy his gambling debts, in what became the largest single slave sale recorded in U.S. history up to that point. Buyers inspected people held in the track's horse stalls for four days before the sale; rain fell throughout, and the event came to be remembered by survivors and their descendants as 'the Weeping Time.' A Georgia Historical Society marker now stands near the site, at the intersection of Augusta Avenue and Dunn Street.