Cheapside: The Market at the Heart of the City

The street called Cheapside runs along the south side of the Fayette County Courthouse in downtown Lexington, a name borrowed from the old marketplace district of London. In Lexington, as in the English original, it was a place of commerce. What was sold there, for most of the antebellum period, was human beings.

Cheapside was one of the largest slave markets in the Upper South. On auction days, which came regularly throughout the calendar year, enslaved people were brought to the courthouse square, made to stand on an elevated block, and sold to the highest bidder. Buyers came from across Kentucky and from the Deep South states, where the cotton and sugar economies demanded a constant supply of labor.

Lexington sat at the center of a trade network that reached from Virginia and Maryland, through the Bluegrass breeding ground, and down the rivers to New Orleans. The numbers were staggering. Kentucky exported tens of thousands of enslaved people in the decades before the Civil War, not because its agricultural economy required that scale, but because the domestic slave trade had become a business in itself.

Bluegrass planters who grew hemp and tobacco could profit more from selling their enslaved workers south than from any crop. Families were separated here. Children were sold away from their mothers on this block, on this ground, in a transaction as routine and unremarkable to the sellers as any other commercial exchange.

No monument stood on Cheapside for generations to name what occurred there. A historical marker was eventually added. The block is a public space now, used for festivals and outdoor events.

The courthouse still stands at the head of the street.