Short-lived Memphis-Arkansas Speedway was a tragic piece of NASCAR history

In a time well before NASCAR’s period of westward expansion saw a plethora of 1.5-mile tracks be built across the United States, the Memphis-Arkansas Speedway in Crittenden County, Arkansas was an oddity.

The track was a high-speed, mile-and-a-half dirt track that featured some of the highest speeds on the NASCAR calendar in its time.

Perhaps the most normal aspect of the track was the fact that, like many tracks of the time, it was built in the middle of nowhere. The track sat in Lehi, Arkansas — hardly a hotbed for anything, much less big-league stock car racing.

Nevertheless, track owners Nat Epstein, Clarence Camp and Harold Woolridge somehow drew Bill France and 28 NASCAR Cup Series entries to northeastern Arkansas for the first time in October 1954 for the inaugural Mid-South 250.

For a period of the sport’s history that featured some of the best stock-car driver to ever compete, the entry list for the track’s first race was relatively sparse in terms of star power. Three-time Cup champion and 1959 Daytona 500 winner Lee Petty led 150 of 167 laps in the first race at the new venue, but an axle issue relegated him to a third-place effort and gave Buck Baker the win.

The second race at the track in 1955 showcased the appeal of racing on the high-speed, high-banked dirt track. Fonty Flock led 88 laps and won the race with an average speed of 89.982 miles per hour, a solid pace for the time. A reported crowd of 15,000 was on hand to witness the race.

It was in 1956 that the track became infamous. A pair of fatalities among drivers Thomas ‘Cotton’ Priddy, 27, and Clint McHugh, 28, during the 1956 Mid-South 250 weekend solidified its place in NASCAR lore. 

McHugh’s accident occurred in qualifying on June 9. In his first attempt at qualifying for a Grand National Race, McHugh’s Oldsmobile flipped over a guardrail in Turn 3 and tumbled into a lake. While he was pulled back to land by fans, McHugh died at an area hospital from his injuries.

During the race itself on June 10, Priddy was thrown from his vehicle on Lap 39 after contact with another car. Unlike McHugh, Priddy died instantly.

“I knew what it was going to be like to be married to Thomas,” Priddy’s widow told the Louisville, Ky. Courier-Journal on June 11, 1956. “I went into the constant worry and pain with my eyes wide open, but I never told him to stop (racing). I expected him to be killed.”

At that point, the writing was on the wall for the Memphis-Arkansas Speedway. Epstein, Woolridge and Camp knew that if the track was going to continue to attract NASCAR races in the coming years, it would have to be paved.

The problem? Even in 1957, paving a 1.5-mile superspeedway cost $100K, an impossible sum of money for the track’s owners. 

Land such as that taken up by the speedway is a hot commodity in the Delta region. A farmer purchased the property in 1958 and flooded the infield in an effort to grow catfish. Eventually, the track that once served as a ring for NASCAR’s early gladiators was leveled and used as farmland for soybeans and rice.

In a way, the Memphis-Arkansas Speedway encapsulated the unintended arrogance with which many tracks and sanctioning bodies in the early years of professional racing conducted themselves. A track that was once a fascinating venue quickly turned into the site of two incredibly tragic deaths and, after less than five years of racing, was both literally and figuratively leveled.