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68 NPS Form 10 -900 -a OMB Approval No. 1024 -0018 (8 -86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Occoneechee Speedway Orange County, N.C. Section number 8 Page 20 Rev. C.H. Reckard, pastor of the Hillsboro Presbyterian Church, delivered a sermon critical of local stock car racing and its effect on area young people. Protests by Reckard and other area clergy culminated in the passage of a bill on May 8, 1957 which banned racing on Sundays. 56 Apparently, the ban on Sunday racing did not endure, because Sunday races were announced in an October 1961 edition of The News of Orange County. In 1958, Bill France leased the track to the Orange County Board of Education for $100 per year for ten years so that local athletic teams would have a venue for their games. 57 For every race he held at the speedway, France paid the school board $250. By this time, only three or four races per year were held at the track.58 For local residents one of the highlights in the speedway's history was the appearance of Hollywood starlet Jayne Mansfield in the pace car for a race held on March 10, 1963. A local newspaper reported that Mansfield, in North Carolina for a nightclub appearance in Greensboro, "skillfully signed autographs continuously throughout the entire time, while keeping tabs [sic] on the cars whirling around the dust choked track below. "59 Throughout its twenty -year history as an official NASCAR venue, the Occoneechee Speedway hosted automobile racing's greatest figures. Richard Petty, the Randleman native known as "The King" for his dominance of the sport for nearly two decades, raced at the Hillsborough track throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as did his father Lee Petty. Among other prominent racers who regularly competed at Occoneechee were Ned Jarrett, known as "Gentleman Jarrett" for his kind demeanor off the track; Junior Johnson; Fireball Roberts and Curtis Turner. The final Grand National race at Orange Speedway took place on September 15, 1968. One NASCAR historian characterized the race as "an epic, fender crunching, bumper banging, paint swapping war out on the track" in which Richard Petty eventually dominated by a seven -lap margin. The traditional fall Grand National race that had always taken place at Occoneechee since the founding of NASCAR was transferred to a new track Bill France Sr. had built at Talladega, Alabama. 60 56 Session Laws and Resolutions of North Carolina, 1957, c.588, s. 252. 57 The News of Orange County, March 20, 1980. 58 The News of Orange County, September 14, 1961. 59 The News of Orange County, March 14, 1963. 60 McLaughlin, "Occoneechee Speedway."