North Carolina State Fairgrounds

The half-mile dirt oval at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds in Raleigh opened in 1928, when the fair moved to the site it still occupies. It held three Grand National races across fifteen years, and the last of them closed a door that stayed shut for half a century.

Junior Johnson won the first, in May 1955, in a race rain cut short of its distance. Fourteen years passed before the series came back. David Pearson took the North State 200 in June 1969, leading 182 of the 200 laps, with Richard Petty second. Petty won the Home State 200 the following September, leading the last 112 laps in front of a crowd of about six thousand.

That afternoon, September 30, 1970, turned out to be the final time NASCAR's top division raced on dirt. The surface did not come back to the schedule for fifty-one years, until the series ran a clay-covered Bristol in 2021. The fairgrounds gave up racing shortly after 1970. The grandstand is still standing, still owned by the state, and still put to use every October.