Barco Drag Strip/Maple Airstrip (Elizabeth City)

The Army Air Force built the Barco Flight Strip around 1942, and it went to civilian use after the war. In 1955 the Eastern North Carolina Racing Association leased the abandoned Maple Airstrip from the State Highway Commission and started racing in May, with NHRA field director Harry M. Perry managing. The East Coast Championship drag races were held there in August 1957. In July 1958 the commission, not all of whose members agreed, extended the lease on the Barco Drag Strip in Maple, Currituck County, for one year from May 15, 1958, while it looked into selling the property. Races ran on the second and fourth Sundays under NHRA sanction. Art Arfons set a strip record of 7.433 at 152.54 MPH on July 27, 1958.

On February 22, 1959, Earl Layden, 28, was killed when he lost control and plowed into spectators and parked cars along the course. Five spectators went to the hospital, and one of them, Robert Lee Meads, 28, of Virginia, died a week later. The other four sued for a total of $190,000 in Pasquotank Superior Court. By then the lease had passed from the Highway Commission to the State Prison Commission, because the airstrip sat next to a high-security prison camp. Believing spectators were passing contraband through the fence to prisoners during races, the Prison Commission ended the lease on September 30, 1959, after five years of racing. At the time it was the only drag strip in North Carolina sanctioned by a national body. The old field is now Currituck County Regional Airport.