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7 dated events match your filters.
Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–7.Back to highlights
Entries
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Hillsboro Speedway, Inc. buys the Occoneechee Farm racetrack tract
W. S. Murchison and J. R. Rogers sold two hundred acres of the old Occoneechee Farm, including its horse track, to Hillsboro Speedway, Inc., the company Bill France and four partners had chartered to build a stock car track. France had spotted the track while flying over Orange County.
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Occoneechee Speedway opens
Occoneechee Speedway, a one-mile dirt oval that Bill France and four North Carolina partners built on the old Occoneechee Farm horse track outside Hillsborough, opened with a 100-mile NASCAR stock car race won by Fonty Flock.
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NASCAR comes to Occoneechee Speedway
Occoneechee Speedway near Hillsborough hosted the third race of NASCAR's first Strictly Stock season, a 200-lap event won by Bob Flock. It is the only dirt track from that inaugural season that still survives.
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Orange Speedway, Inc. takes over the Hillsborough track
Bill France Sr. became president of the new Orange Speedway, Inc., with Ann France as secretary-treasurer and Enoch Staley as vice-president; the other three original partners were no longer with the track. It was known as Orange Speedway from 1954.
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A quarter-mile track opens inside Orange Speedway
A new quarter-mile track built inside the Orange Speedway mile opened with a seven-event NASCAR sportsman and amateur racing program under the direction of Bill France and Enoch Staley.
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Bill France leases Orange Speedway to the Orange County Board of Education
Bill France signed a ten-year lease letting Hillsboro High School use the Orange Speedway grounds as its athletic field, for $100 a year, while races continued.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
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Orange Speedway, Inc. is dissolved
The three shareholders of Orange Speedway, Inc., Ann and Bill France and Enoch Staley, voluntarily dissolved the corporation sixteen years after the last race. France Staley, LLC, which held title to the track, sold it to Preservation North Carolina in 1997.
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A dated event is a fact, filed on the page of the subject it belongs to: a person, a place, a theme, or a named event or history. Pages are subjects, with their own works and sources; the Place, community, or institution filter also gathers the institutions that recur in the entries without a page of their own. The page opens on the highlights; a search or any filter looks through every dated event and storyline, and each filter’s counts say how many entries choosing it would show alongside the others. A storyline is a longer history that gathers related dated events, and each storyline’s page lists its own. Counts give dated events and storylines separately. Dates come from the sources named on the cards and from the index’s event pages; where sources disagree, the card follows the county records. Entries marked approximate or needing research say so on the card; the rest were checked against the source named on it. The correction link under the entries opens the contact form; name the entry and its date and the Friends will check the source. Suggest an event →
Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated October 2, 2026.
