Local figure
Bill France Sr., the Daytona Beach promoter who organized NASCAR, and four partners chartered Hillsboro Speedway, Inc. in September 1947 to build Occoneechee Speedway outside Hillsborough. He was president of Orange Speedway, Inc., formed in 1952, and in 1958 leased the grounds to the Orange County Board of Education for high school athletics.
Orange County Indexed has not yet linked an indexed work directly to Bill France Sr. The biography and the dated events on this page provide sources about Bill France Sr.’s life and work.
Dated events connected with this person, in date order. See these 7 dated events in the chronology →
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows them all.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
People named in the same dated entries as Bill France Sr., those sharing the most entries first. Each line links one of the shared entries in the chronology, where its source is cited. A shared entry shows these people in the same event, not how well they knew each other.
Background reading on Occoneechee Speedway, Hillsborough. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss Bill France Sr.. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Edward P. Sanseverino's 1995 account of the Occoneechee-Orange Speedway, the stock car track outside Hillsborough that ran in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Topics include automobile racing and racetracks in North Carolina and Hillsborough in the twentieth century.
Photographs made by Jock Lauterer in and around Chapel Hill from about 1964 to 1968, some 3,522 items in the North Carolina Collection at UNC. Subjects include the Speaker Ban Law, Ku Klux Klan activity in North Carolina, Tar Heel basketball and football, the Jubilee festival, the Old Well, and visitors including Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Bob Hope and Jayne Mansfield.
Clippings and promotional materials on the Occoneechee Speedway near Hillsborough, the dirt racetrack later renamed Orange Speedway. An undated folder from box 31 of the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Vertical File Collection, Carrboro and Orange County series.
Sources and research tools for this person. For ready-made searches of other catalogs, see Search further. Research guide: Trace a family through historical records.
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Picture: Bill France Sr., newspaper photograph, 1949. Public domain. Twin City Sentinel, 1949; via Wikimedia Commons
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