Hallsville Twin Lane Drag Strip

Hallsville had two drag strips within a mile of each other. The first, Twin Lane Drag Strip, opened in July 1960. R. A. Gray, Norman Huffman and Jack Cornish owned the concrete track, which ran every Sunday and drew about 200 spectators and 30 to 50 cars a week. It sloped downhill from the starting line on a southwest-northeast line, and aerial photos show it just north of the later Hallsville strip. It may be the track one old racer remembered from an NHRA divisional race at Hallsville. In 1998 he recalled that the track ran downhill to the finish line and then up and over a hill on the shutdown. Cresting that hill on his first pass, he found he was almost out of track, and from then on he hit the brakes hard as soon as he crossed the finish line.

The second strip opened on Sunday, August 16, 1970, two miles north of Hallsville on FM 450. It was a paved quarter-mile strip on a three-quarter-mile layout, with bleachers for 2,000, parking for 3,000 cars and a two-story control tower. Mrs. A. W. “Jack” Cornish owned and operated it, Ken Hall ran it, and Monroe Luman was its first announcer. It opened with two lanes, but by the late 1970s it had been resurfaced and the median taken out. In 1975 Hallsville joined the strips in Paris and Whitehouse in a three-race Texas Modified Championships for gassers and altereds, with a total purse over $3,000. Robert Kornegay managed the track in 1977, and it was IHRA sanctioned from 1977 to 1979.

Around 2002 Johnny Isaacs sold the track to Chuck Bishop. When Bishop missed mortgage payments, a bankruptcy foreclosure was filed, and the two carried on a long feud. The strip closed after a divorce settlement led to a bank foreclosure and auction of the property. A fatal shooting at the track in 2005, set off by an argument over a gambling bet, was the final straw. The old strip is now Highland Boulevard, lined with houses.