Hampton Park, Public park in Charleston, United States.

Hampton Park is a large public green space in Charleston with extensive walking trails, ornamental ponds for viewing, and carefully designed garden areas throughout. The grounds feature maintained gardens with roses and native plants that change across the seasons.

By 1769 the land was part of John Gibbes' Orange Grove Plantation. In 1835 the South Carolina Jockey Club bought part of it and laid out the Washington Race Course, whose Italianate grandstand was designed by Charles F. Reichardt; Mary Murray Drive now follows the track's course. During the Civil War the track became a prisoner-of-war camp where at least 257 Union soldiers died and were buried in a mass grave. On May 1, 1865, freedpeople and the 54th Massachusetts marched there, an event cited as the first Memorial Day; by 1871 the dead had been reinterred at Beaufort and Florence national cemeteries.

The park is named for Wade Hampton III, a Confederate general, South Carolina governor and Red Shirts member who owned one of the South's largest collections of enslaved people. On May 1, 1865, newly freed Black Charlestonians held a procession of up to 10,000 people here, decorating the graves of Union dead buried behind the race course grandstand; the site is cited as a candidate for the first Memorial Day.

Mary Murray Drive forms a one-mile loop circling the park, following almost exactly the line of the old Washington Race Course track. The wide gravel path in the photograph runs straight between rows of trees, lit by black metal lampposts, with wooden benches set along the planted edges. The Citadel borders the park to the west, Hampton Park Terrace to the south, North Central to the east and Wagener Terrace to the north.

Mary Murray Drive follows the line of the old Washington Race Course, a one-mile loop that circles the park almost exactly where the 1835 track ran. The course's Italianate grandstand was designed by Charles F. Reichardt, and in February the annual races drew thousands of spectators.