FALL 2004 ISSUE

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Originally published in the Fall 2004 Virginia Tech Research Magazine.

Material appearing in the Virginia Tech Research Magazine may be reprinted provided the endorsement of a commercial product is not stated or implied. Please credit the researchers involved and Virginia Tech.

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Life in the fast lane enriches Virginia’s landscape

Culture of racing a significant part of past and present

By Susan Trulove

Every weekend through the summer and much of the spring and fall, families gather at Virginia's race-car tracks. “People sit in the same places every week, like church,” says Brian Katen. And, like church, going to the races is a social event. Among the big names in the powerful cars, are friends, neighbors, and family members who drive, build, maintain, sponsor, or manage in some other way to get race-car grease under their fingernails.

Katen, associate professor of landscape architecture, studies landscape as places that embody memory and meaning. “You can see past use. The stories are still alive - gone but not gone.” That has been his experience since his first race. “Almost everyone I meet at the races has a family member who raced and almost every one has a story.”

Katen went to school in Charlottesville, Va., and then lived in Northern Virginia before moving to Southwest Virginia in 1997. “In Northern Virginia and Charlottesville, auto racing was covered on page six of the sports section. In the Roanoke newspaper, it's on the front page. Racing is part of the culture. I thought, 'If I am going to live here, I need to understand the culture,'" Katen says. "So my wife and I went to the New River Valley Speedway (now the Motor Mile Speedway) in Dublin."

It was their first race. Katen tells of finding a seat at the fourth turn and watching as the cars drove the warm-up lap. Then, as the vehicles came around the fourth turn, the green fl ag dropped on the straightaway just ahead. "The noise as they all accelerated at once was amazing. I felt like the fellow in the stereo ad whose hair is blown back."

Between races, when it was possible to carry on a conversation, Katen talked to other race goers. "They were mostly families. One man introduced me to his dad, Peanut Turman, an old dirt-track racer from Dugspur. I asked him where he had raced and he named every county around here."

Katen went looking for the old tracks and found 110 of them.

He talked with drivers, track officials, and speedway owners to locate tracks that are now pastures, cornfields, forests, and suburbs. One ethereal landscape is a racetrack he discovered in a decades-old forest, with trees grown up between the seats of the concrete bleachers.

"The most important resource for locating the old tracks has been the people - especially the racers and fans," says Katen. "Everyone remembered where a track was. In many cases, they remembered generally where and when a track was, then someone else would add information. Sometimes someone would take me to a track. Other times I could use aerial photos."

Katen and his students' search of the archives of local Natural Resource Conservation Service's offices turned up the aerial shots. "The soil service shot the whole state every 10 years beginning in the 1940s.

"The tracks really stand out if they were in operation at the time an aerial photo was taken. Afterwards, they are visible if you know what to look for," Katen says. "The first blush of vegetation erases the track. But as trees move in, the compaction of the earth stunts the growth of the trees that take root on the actual track so that after a few years you can see the oval in the tree canopy."

The first abandoned racetrack that Katen found was the New River Track in Ivanhoe. "I heard about it and found an aerial photo. But I couldn't figure out how to get to it. I stopped at a garage and asked a fellow who was working on a go-cart. As he was trying to give me directions, a friend of his came along and volunteered to take me to the track."

Once there, Katen met Jim Jackson, who lived on the site and whose father built the track. "We walked the site and the track was very legible even though part of it was in pasture.

In some cases, old racetracks show up on U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) maps. "I think that depends on who entered the information," Katen says. "Local people would have considered the tracks to be landmarks. The USGS maps were particularly good about showing fairgrounds."

Newspaper articles and posters sometimes describe how to get to a racetrack. "Newspaper articles confirmed information about dates. The articles about openings and even closings also tell who the owners were."

Katen found many posters in private collections.

"People have shared their scrapbooks with me. I would talk to someone who referred me to someone else, and so on. It took awhile to get people's trust because others have borrowed their photos and not returned them," he says. "But I can take my computer and scanner to someone's home and scan the photos and posters, so don't have to borrow them." He gives each family a CD of their images that he has scanned. "I've met more nice people as I've been doing this," he says. "People frequently tell me how much they appreciate my interest."

Discovering tracks is fun — and the most fun is when the discovery is during a site visit, Katen says. "You are walking through the woods and you know the track is there somewhere. Then you realize that you are standing in it. The landform emerges out of the forest as your eye adjusts. Sometimes you feel yourself walking around a banked curve."

Many tracks were down dirt roads, back in the country. In some places, there are still fence posts. In a few places, the buildings and flag stands remain. Tires were often used to line the inside of a track. At Floyd, Katen found half-buried tires still ringing the infield.

History of racing in Virginia

Auto racing in Virginia began in 1904 at Virginia Beach. The race was to have taken place on the beach, where the cars achieved 60 mph laps during practice, but sand and tides didn't cooperate. When race day came, the weather forced the race to relocate to the Norfolk fairgrounds. After that, until 1937, races across the state were held at fairgrounds.
"Since colonial times, race day - horse racing - was always a part of the fair. These horse tracks became car tracks," Katen says. The state fair began to have auto races in 1907, and racing became a part of the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving events at the state fairgrounds as well. Katen's search of archives has identified many early 20th century fairground sites, including in Marion, Staunton, Harrisonburg, Wise, Suffolk, Emporia, Lynchburg, Norfolk, Covington, Fincastle, Marshall, Stuart, Tasley, Weirwood, Keller, Chester, Upperville, and Cape Charles. He has since discovered period photographs and visited many of these locations.

Before World War II, races were staged events with professional drivers who traveled a circuit. The 1904 race was an international trial with drivers who had raced in Germany the same year.

Racing soon became important to Virginia businesses and communities. In 1913, the Kline Car Company of Richmond began to produce race cars, including the successful Jimmy Junior. At the 1920 race in Bluefield, the racers arrived by train early in the week, having raced the previous weekend in New Jersey. A Jimmy Junior was among the field. Restaurants promoted business by advertising speedy service.

In Covington in 1925, in addition to the circuit drivers, there were races for local people. The local events came to be called "Doctor Races" because most cars owned locally belonged to doctors.

"The car was so new that dealers would allow cars from their showrooms to be raced, then would use the results in their ads the next week. These were the first 'stock car' races," says Katen.

The magazine, The Automobile, covered all types of racing and reported on the communities where the races were held, noting how many autos of any kind were owned locally.

In 1937, a race in Winchester — in a field across the road from the airport — was the first race not held on a fairground. The Airport Speedway, now the Winchester Speedway, is still active and the oldest on its original site in Virginia.

After World War II, former soldiers who had gained experience driving military vehicles wanted to race. And the public, after four years of no races, was ready to go racing too. One of the first races at the City Stadium in Richmond, an open wheel midget car race, drew 12,000 people. The next weekend, 14,000 showed up. The Jaycees sponsored a race in Galax, and a race in Winchester benefited the Nurses Association.

In 1947, the Southwest Virginia Speedway near Marion was the first track built for stock cars as we think of them today, Katen says. Until that time, open-wheel cars predominated. But after the war, so-called stock cars evolved into powerful machines built for racing.

There is racing lore about bootlegging's being a training ground for racing. "A fast car was an important part of the equipment to the illegal liquor business, so racing and bootlegging were woven together," says Katen. "That connection is not all myth, but it's localized. There are moves on the racetrack that came from Southern back roads."

As NASCAR formed in 1947, it created formal circuits and relationships with tracks. Outlaw tracks were those that were not part of the circuit. The market tended to settle most of them out - but not right away. By the late 1940s, races were also being held on baseball fields and other athletic fields, such as Victory Stadium, a football field in Roanoke, Va.

The community of racing included engine builders, mechanics, owners, and extended families, says Katen. One of the best engine builders was L.O. Stanley, who had an engine shop in Meadows of Dan and was a consultant to Ford Motor Company. "He built the most powerful engines," says Katen "They were works of art."

Katen describes one of Stanley's engines that is on display at the Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College. "It is a handmade race engine. It has what looks like a standard carburetor on top, then two more carburetors inside the engine." Carburetors provide the explosive mixture of fuel and air to the engine. "Stanley tripled that capacity in his engine, and increased the displacement, or cylinder volume, resulting in greater power. But from the outside, the engine looks no different from any other," says Katen. "Now we celebrate that kind of genius. There is a lot of American ingenuity in making cars go fast."

Racing as landscape

“After my first race, I was intrigued by this other Virginia landscape that I had heard nothing about," says Katen. "Virginia has well known places that present the commonwealth to visitors - Civil War battlefields, plantations, the Blue Ridge Parkway. "But there are other parts of Virginia that are important. Such as the crooked trail - a music trail from Ferrum to far Southwest Virginia, where bluegrass music comes from. And one-third of the local racetracks were in Southwest Virginia," says Katen. "These are important places. The real power of racing - that ties the state together - emanates from Southwest Virginia. It is an important landscape that was unrecognized," he says. "And it is an important social landscape that is not part of the Civil War battlefield and plantation way of understanding life in Virginia before television.

"I want to understand the full richness of the Virginia landscape. Finding the old tracks was a way to bring focus to the landscape of Southwest Virginia. The speedway sites and the crooked trail are wonderful opportunities to champion Southwest Virginia."

The 110 local tracks that Katen located did not all exist at once. There was an ebb and flow. One track would disappear if a better one opened, or if the soil wasn't good. The first racetrack built after the war, in a cornfield near Marion, lasted only a year because race goers could watch from the surrounding hillsides without paying admission. A track near Charlottesville closed when the owner was killed on the highway. The Galax fairground was in town, where the incredible noise of powerful cars was not welcome. Tracks that lasted were those that could adapt. Changes included improvements and new events. Some tracks were shortened to make the racing more exciting and others became figure 8s for the same reason.

All the drivers knew each other. They raced the circuits together and still attend old time dirt race meetings. The second time Katen attended the annual meeting of the Virginia Carolina Old Time Dirt Racer's Association in Danville, he gave a PowerPoint presentation about his research to date on the Virginia speedways. "It was graciously received by the members and they have enthusiastically supported my research and provided significant documentation of the early racing landscape of Virginia," Katen says.

While many NASCAR drivers from Virginia began their careers at small, local tracks, such tracks were not a training system, like minor league baseball, says Katen. "They were a venue for serious local competition, where your friends and family went racing.

"There is a perception that racing is on the perimeter, but if you talk to Virginians from this part of the state, you will learn that everyone's family used to go to the races," says Katen. "The remaining Virginia speedways are landscapes of community pride, social intercourse, ritual, and entertainment. They are a significant contemporary layer of the Virginia landscape, with historical importance and significant economic impact."

Katen says it is a history that has tremendous potential in terms of tourism, when you look at the popularity of racing. There are initiatives in South Boston and Stuart to have racing museums, he says. "The racetrack in Martinsville is important to the economy. A lot of people travel there to see those events.

"A lot of local guys who traveled the early racing circuits have a keen sense that they were a part of something important, which became today's NASCAR. There is a camaraderie and sense of pride. The drivers are fierce competitors and great friends," says Katen. "And to the fans, they are heroes."