By Jarred Marlowe
Long before Martinsville Speedway became one of the crown jewels of American motorsport, it was little more than a dusty red clay oval carved out of the Virginia countryside. It was a dream that nearly broke its founders before the first green flag ever flew.
The story begins with Henry Clay Earles, a local businessman who caught the racing bug attending stock car events in Salisbury, North Carolina. Partnering with Sam Rice and Henry Lawrence, Earles identified a 30-acre plot of land in Ridgeway, Virginia, and the three men each committed $10,000 to bring their vision to life. The budget proved woefully insufficient. By the time a basic red clay track and guard rail were in place, costs had doubled. Still, Earles and Rice pushed forward.
On September 7, 1947, the gates opened for the very first time. Red Byron took the victory in front of 6,013 paying spectators, though the day was hardly glamorous. Thousands of fans crashed the event without paying, and the unpaved surface whipped up such a fierce red cloud that the crowd was rendered unrecognizable by race’s end. Earles would later quip that not even an H-bomb could have produced more dust.
What followed was a relentless march of progress. By 1948, a concrete fence had been erected to manage crowds, a neighboring farm purchased to expand parking, and a 4,000-seat grandstand completed. The speedway’s ambitions were validated in 1949 when it hosted its first NASCAR Cup Series race, again claimed by Byron, and further legitimized in 1950 when NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. purchased co-ownership stakes from Rice and Lawrence.
The track’s physical transformation accelerated through the 1950s. After years of deliberation, Earles announced in 1955 that the dirt surface would be paved, accompanied by a concrete retaining wall and expanded seating. A new East Grandstand added 7,000 seats by 1957, pushing capacity to roughly 16,000. Improvements continued well into the 1960s, with a new press box, widened turns, and additional grandstand sections lifting the total past 21,000 by 1965.
The decades that followed brought an almost relentless cycle of expansion. Through the 1970s and 1980s, new towers and grandstand sections rose with regularity. A sobering chapter arrived on October 24, 1985, when modified driver Richie Evans was fatally injured in a crash in turns three and four, the first of two tragedies the track would endure in as many years. Despite the heartbreak, construction never paused for long. By the late 1990s, a cascade of new seating structures had pushed capacity past 90,000, an extraordinary figure for a track measuring barely more than a half mile around.
The death of Henry Clay Earles on November 16, 1999, closed the book on more than five decades of personal stewardship. He had shepherded a dust-choked dirt oval into a major league motorsports venue, weathering budget crises, tragedies, and the ever-changing demands of the sport he loved. His grandson Clay Campbell inherited the helm before the France family’s International Speedway Corporation acquired the facility in 2004 for $192 million. NASCAR itself assumed full ownership in 2019.
Today, with capacity scaled back and grass replacing grandstand seats in some corners, Martinsville looks rather different from its peak years. But its history tells a remarkable story. Nearly eight decades of unbroken racing on the same stretch of Virginia soil where, one September afternoon in 1947, six thousand dusty fans watched Red Byron and wondered what this little track might one day become.
Jarred Marlowe is a local resident and historian. He is a member of the Col. George Waller Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, the Blue & Gray Education Society, and the committee chair for the Martinsville-Henry County 250 Committee. He may be reached at marloweja15@gmail.com.
