Jackson County Speedway Gone, But Not Forgotten


The Beginning

This ad for the opening of the Jackson County Speedway ran in the July 3, 1947 edition of the Jackson Herald newspaper.

This ad for the opening of the Jackson County Speedway ran in the July 3, 1947 edition of the Jackson Herald newspaper.

The track was laid out as a half-mile dirt track, with high-banked turns.

“Dick Law, a construction dealer in Gainesville, was the one who graded the track in Jefferson,” Hollis Sr. recalled. “While they were digging dirt out of the middle of the track, in the infield, they discovered a natural spring. My dad told them to keep digging in that area, and said if they could do it, he wanted it to look like Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta with a lake in the middle.  They kept on until they hit enough water to fill up a pond, and that track had a pond in the middle of it.”

Track workers would pull water from the pond to put down on the track, along with calcium chloride, to try to keep the dust down during the races.

According to an advertisement that ran in the July 3, 1947 edition of The Jackson Herald, the grand opening of the Jackson County Speedway took place on Friday, July 4, 1947 with a 100-lap stock car race. The ad identifies the track as being located at “Crawford Long Airport”.

Over the years, records have been lost, due to fires, or just the ravages of time.  Nobody remembers who won that first event.  But Bobby Whitmire of Dry Pond remembers what the track was like. He started out as a spectator there before becoming a driver.

“It was a pretty good race track,” Whitmire said. “It was one of the first that was actually built for a race car.  Most of the things we were running on back then were old horse tracks.

The late Tommy Roberts was an early racer at Jackson County Speedway, driving for track owner Gene Hollis.

The late Tommy Roberts was an early racer at Jackson County Speedway, driving for track owner Gene Hollis.

“They had some real good shows, but there wouldn’t be but two or three cars that would run side by side, because you had a lot of cars that would get lapped several times, because there were some that were so outclassed. But they had some of the best drivers. I really don’t think you have the caliber of drivers today that you had back then.”

While no race results remain of the 1947 events at the track, some stories still float around about incidents.  Like the time Ron Hollis Sr. decided to ride along in the race car owned by his father with local driver Tommy Roberts.

“I was actually in the car with him one time when he turned it over,” Hollis Sr. recalled. “It didn’t hurt me or him either.  I was holding on to the safety bars.  It was a practice run on Saturday before the race on Sunday.”

Bobby Whitmire remembered another time Roberts and a legendary Jefferson basketball player took a wild ride at the Jackson County Speedway.

“Gene Hollis had a 1939 Ford, and Spider Crumbly and Tommy Roberts were driving it.  I had seen the car, and it looked pretty good.  Well, when we showed up at Macon, there wasn’t a place on that car that hadn’t been bent and beat back out.  I asked Tommy what happened and he said ‘Well, I liked to kill Spider.  I was practicing down there and he was riding with me, no seat belt, just holding on. And that thing turned over.’  And Spider, there wasn’t a place on him that wasn’t blue and black.”

Aug. 21, 1947 ad for events at the Jackson County Speedway.

Aug. 21, 1947 ad for events at the Jackson County Speedway.

Mike Bell, the historian for the Georgia Auto Racing Hall of Fame Association, had another story from the track handed down to him.  An adjacent property owner told him about the antics of some bootleggers who would turn up before the races.

“He said they’d show up on Friday night or Saturday before the race and party all weekend.  They’d cook pigs in the ground, and have a small and a large dipper to sell sips of moonshine at 25 cents for a small one, and 50 cents for a large one.”

The 1947 racing season ended well, with a show on October 18th featuring an African-American racing circuit named the Atlanta Stock Car Association out of Atlanta.

“They had their own race track starting in ’49, but before that, they went to different tracks all over the northern part of the state,” Bell said. “They ran three of four races there at Jackson County.”

Hollis Sr. remembers “Big Bill” France, who was on the cusp of starting NASCAR, being in attendance at some of the events at the track.  Hollis Sr. says his father and France were friends.  France’s interest in the track boded well for it’s future.

But things would not go as well in 1948.

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