Stock car racing in America began in an old cornfield in the Etowah River bottoms of Dawson County, Georgia. The makeshift track was located around what is now Rock Creek Park.
“It started right down here in the river bottoms in the midthirties. A bunch of liquor guys would meet on Sunday evenings,” said Gordon Pickle, the president of the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame, to the editors of Travels with Foxfire during an interview for the book. “They were just betting on who had the best driver at the time. But word kind of sneaked out, and people started showing up to watch on Sunday evening.”
Pickle claims that Frank Christian of Atlanta witnessed the cornfield races and recognized an opportunity. He went home and rented the old horse track at Lakewood fairgrounds. That became the Lakewood Speedway, which evolved into NASCAR racing in 1948.
NASCAR racer Junior Johnson disagrees, making a case for the birthplace of stock car racing on makeshift racetracks in his home state of North Carolina, but he doesn’t dispute the idea that NASCAR had its genesis in Dawson County.
