Pumpkin Center Drag Strip (Iron Station)

This little-known eighth-mile strip was packed red clay, at what’s now 5204 Stagecoach Road in Iron Station, Lincoln County. There are several places called Pumpkin Center in the area, none with a post office. Susan Brittain Welch, who lives on the property, has described how it ended. Her parents, Forest and Lois Brittain, bought about 65 acres from Clara Perkins, the widow of Rose (possibly Roosevelt) Perkins, who had raised her family there. The house came free, with no indoor bathroom or running water. The family moved in on July 4, 1965, the day of the last race, when Welch was two.

The Perkins and Davis families had both lost sons in speeding-related crashes on the main road, and Mrs. Perkins wouldn’t sell to anyone who’d keep the track going. Closing it was a condition of the sale, though she had already agreed to the July 4 race. The Brittains never ran the track, which had operated under some kind of lease. Welch’s cousin used to take his father’s car to race until his father, watching one day, saw it go down the strip.

The strip began directly behind the house. It had a concession stand but probably no timing tower, and cars seem to have raced two at a time to a flag. There may also have been a track nearer the creek, in a spot the family calls the bottoms. Stagecoach Road, once Substation Road, was a curvy dirt road that wasn’t paved until about the mid-1970s. Welch’s father spent years trying to farm the old strip, but it still grows only grass and can be seen from the air. The land was later split into seven lots, one for each of six children plus a home for their mother, and is labeled the Forest Brittain subdivision. Welch bought her mother’s place in 2010. The family still calls that spot the dragstrip.