his successful runners, Crickmore was voted the retrospective American Champion Two-Year-Old Colt of 1880. In 1868, at a dinner party in Saratoga Springs, New York, Bowie and associates agreed to hold a horse race in 1870 for the yearlings owned by attendees at the party. A wager was placed and the winner of the race would host the losers for dinner. Both Saratoga and the American Jockey Club made bids for the event, but Bowie pledged to build a grand racetrack in his home state if the race were to be run in Baltimore. The Dixie Stakes, (also known as the Dinner Party Stakes) and Pimlico Race Course were the results. Slavery Before the Civil War, Fairview had many slaves. Charles Branch Clark wrote in 1946 in the Maryland Historical Magazine that seventy of Oden Bowie's slaves enlisted in the Union Army. Family and private life Bowie spent most of his life at Fairview Plantation. He married Alice Carter on December 3, 1851. She was the daughter of Charles H. Carter and Rosalie Eugenia Calvert Carter of Goodwood, Prince George's County. Alice's mother was a descendant of George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore the first colonial proprietor of the Province of Maryland. Death Bowie died after a brief illness on December 4, 1894 and was buried at Fairview. Legacy The city of Bowie, Maryland was founded as Huntington in 1870 at a junction of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad. The town was renamed Bowie in the 1880s after Governor Oden Bowie. Odenton, Maryland began as a junction of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad and the Annapolis and Elk Ridge Railroad, named after Oden Bowie in 1872. A 1,800-home subdivision, Fairwood, was built on the land of Oden Bowie's thousand acre plantation, Fairview, in Prince George's County, Maryland. The Fairwood community, which was approximately 73 percent African American in 2015, was heavily impacted by the Subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008, despite its affluence. Bowie descendants lived in the large Federal-style plantation house until 2015. References Further reading Bowie family Democratic Party governors of Maryland Democratic Party Maryland state senators People from Bowie, Maryland St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe) alumni American racehorse owners and breeders 1826 births 1894 deaths Democratic Party members of the Maryland House of Delegates American military personnel of the Mexican–American War 19th-century American politicians