Bobby Williamson
Harnett Co. Speedway
Harnett County Speedway, near Fayetteville, NC, current aerial photo. Harnett hosted a NASCAR Grand National event in 1953, and made one more attempt as a raceway in 1969. The track's concrete grand-stands still overlook the site, and could be used again.......but they are the highlight of this advanced-state ghost track.
I think I remember Bobby and I slippin' in there and having a look around, the track is very maintained and he's right, those concrete stands are still usable. If you go to my photos and search Herb Thomas you will see what is probably the only photo left in existence of the one and only Grand National race.
Jim, we had fun that day sneaking in to the old Harnett County Speedway. It's amazing it's still there, and still relatively remote.
Bobby, That was a fun trip. I returned to Buddy Barefoot Rd. with intentions of going back there but lost the nerve. I did tell the Fort Bragg archeologists about the site and they were very interested but even if it were on Fort Bragg property they would only document it and turn it over to military training land. Ah, the what if's...
Herb won the GN race at Harnett on March 8, 1953.
Here is link to Jim's pic from the race with additional comments.
Finishing order:
Fayetteville Observer published an article in 2013 about the Harnett ghost track.
http://web.archive.org/web/20170308211853/http://www.fayobserver.com/abb14ddb-1a45-521c-b891-88c6f821d82b.html
Faded memories are all that’s left of the time NASCAR came to Harnett County
By Chick Jacobs Staff writer
SPRING LAKE - Sixty years after preachers fumed and engines screamed and more than 7,000 racing fans hollered one of their own to victory, there isn't much left of Harnett County Speedway.
"A lot of people know there's a racetrack back in here somewhere," said lifelong Harnett County native Pat Flowers. He's one of the few remaining who knows where to look.
"But unless you know where, you might look a long time."
Time and trees have pretty much reclaimed the first track in the Cape Fear region to host a NASCAR Grand National event.
But carefully scramble down what's left of long-abandoned grandstands, hop a 3-foot retaining wall and your footing is suddenly solid.
Sixty years later, there's still a track. The clay is packed so densely that only the most opportunistic weeds have gained a foothold.
That's where, for one weekend in 1953, the red clay of Harnett County became the center of the stock car racing world.
Coy Blue, a Spout Springs native who raced at Harnett County Speedway in the late 1960s, recalled the track as "one of the smoothest around. It was a nice little track up in a holler."
In the early '50s, when the owners of Grannis Farm north of Spring Lake decided to go into the racing business, that holler was a natural half-mile oval.
It was a much easier business to get into 60 years ago. Instead of the gleaming concrete cathedrals that house NASCAR races today, many races were held on tracks about a third the size of today's smallest tracks.
Dirt was the surface of choice. In 1953, 90 percent of races were run on dirt. The average winner's purse was $1,000.
NASCAR, then a fledgling organization, needed a race to replace an early season event in Jacksonville, Fla. A track in central North Carolina seemed perfect - even if it had to be built from scratch.
Flowers, whose family farmed nearby land, could hear the construction from his home on Shady Grove Road. Clay for the track was dug out of a hill. Rows of cinder blocks were topped with 2-by-10-inch slabs of pine for seats. A small cinder block structure was built at the start-finish line, with a concession stand added at the top of the hill that served as grandstands.
Like most small tracks, seating was only on one side of the track, between Turns 4 and 1. The other side, between Turns 2 and 3, was where race crews camped and wrecked cars went to die.
A narrow, bulldozed path between Sandy Grove Road and Bethel Church was named Race Track Road, and fields where tobacco would grow later that summer were cleared for parking.
By the first week of March, everything was ready.
The race buzz arrived well before the gates opened.
The winners of NASCAR's first two races in 1953 were going to be at the inaugural Harnett County Speedway race. Lee Petty, the winner at West Palm Beach, Fla., and Bill Blair, who had won the most recent race at Daytona Beach, Fla., were in the field. So was Tim Flock, the 1952 NASCAR champion.
Most fans were pulling for "hometown boy" Herb Thomas, a hard-charging 30-year-old from Olivia. Thomas had finished second to Flock in the previous year's championship battle and had worked through some tough breaks earlier in the season.
With his knowledge of North Carolina clay racing, Thomas was considered one of the race favorites. At the very least, it should be a good race.
Flowers was a young boy in 1953, too young to hike through the farm fields and stands of pine to watch the race alone.
His dad, a churchgoing Baptist, refused to take in such activity on the Sabbath. It wasn't just the temptation to skip church. It was the traffic. People who still live in the area remember the cars on the road more than the ones on the track."There were cars everywhere," said Carl McDonald, who lives on Bethel Church Road. "We'd never seen anything like it."
Preachers in the area lamented the traffic jams that kept churchgoing folks out of the pews.
"Dad was really mad about it," Flowers said. "We went to old Bethel Baptist, and the roads that morning were clogged with cars. You couldn't get there."
Some race fans simply trekked through the fields, avoiding the traffic and the admission charge.
"Us country boys knew our way around up here," Flowers said. "So they'd just hike around the back and walk right in."
By race time, a crowd estimated by race officials at 7,000 had jammed the stands. Others joined the race crews in the infield, braving the dust kicked up on a breezy afternoon.
"They had to get water from Mitchell's Pond next door to damp the track," Flowers said.
According to NASCAR records, Thomas had the pole in his '53 Hudson, with Ohio native Mike Klapak on the outside in a '53 Olds.
It was going to be a 100-mile, 200-lap shootout on a sunny Sunday afternoon. As it turned out, only Thomas came out firing.
He beat Klapak into Turn 1 and didn't let anyone get past him from then on. Two hours later, Thomas was still there, taking the checkered flag for a wire-to-wire win. Dick Rathmann, a California driver, was the only driver within three laps of him at the end.
Thomas' winning speed: 51 mph, slower than the dump trucks that regularly rumble up and down nearby N.C. 210 now.
As the dust settled, NASCAR's best packed up and headed home.
They never came back. A year later, Jacksonville returned to the race schedule, and Harnett County Speedway was closed soon afterward.
NASCAR returned to the area in 1957 and '58, running at Fayetteville's Champion Speedway. New owners sold shares in the Harnett County Speedway, cleaned up the track and ran short-track races in the late 1960s and early '70s.
"You could do a lot more racing for a lot less money back then," Blue said. "A lot of the guys had regular jobs, then raced on the weekend. It was a great little track, and a lot of the local names were there."
In time, the farmland around the track was sold. It now is used for timber and sod farming.
Part of the track's cinder block retaining wall has collapsed. The only spectators now are fire ants in mounds on the back stretch. An empty deer stand stands watch over a cluster of beer cans in Turn 2.
"Before too long, it will all be gone, I reckon," Flowers said. "The folks who own it now say they wouldn't want to put a track on it again. For a while, though, it was the place to be. It was fun, and it was loud."
And in the minds of those who heard the thunder, it remains a rust-colored ribbon, looping into eternity.