Traces the early history of Darlingon International Raceway and the Southern 500, NASCAR's first five-hundred-mile race

Some facilities are so special that they literally define their sport. Stock car racing as it is known today did not exist until one man, armed with a vision and a willingness to get his hands dirty, constructed a race track in the middle of a South Carolina peanut field. More than six decades later, Darlington Raceway is still considered one of the crown jewels of racing. "The Lady in Black" is home to the largest margin of victory in NASCAR® history and its closest-ever finish. The legendary track has been the proving ground for every superstar of the sport.

The South Carolina Historical Marker Program, established in 1936, has approved the installation of more than 1,700 interpretive plaques, each highlighting how places both grand and unassuming have played important roles in the history of the Palmetto State. These roadside markers identify and interpret places valuable for understanding South Carolina's past, including sites of consequential events and buildings, structures, or other resources significant for their design or their association with institutions or individuals prominent in local, state, or national history. This volume includes a concise history of the South Carolina Historical Marker Program and an overview of the marker application process. For those interested in specific historic periods or themes, the volume features condensed lists of markers associated with broader topics such as the American Revolution, African American history, women's history, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. While the program is administered by the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, most markers are proposed by local organizations that serve as a marker's official sponsor, paying its cost and assuming responsibility for its upkeep. In that sense, this inventory is a record not just of places and subjects that the state has deemed worthy of acknowledgment, but of those that South Carolinians themselves have worked to enshrine.

For over 75 years markers have been erected across South Carolina's highways, biways, roads, and streets. These markers are now collected into one book containing the marker names, inscriptions, dates erected, sponsoring organizations, coordinates and physical locations. Author and historian Brian Scott takes you on a county-by-county journey as you explore 1,446 historical markers that tell the story of South Carolina. --

The first organized, sanctioned American stock car race took place in 1908 on a road course around Briarcliff, New York--staged by one of America's early speed mavens, William K. Vanderbilt, Jr. A veteran of the early Ormond-Daytona Beach speed trials, Vanderbilt brought the Grand Prize races to Savannah, Georgia, the same year. What began as a rich man's sport eventually became the working man's sport, finding a home in the South with the infusion of moonshiners and their souped-up cars. Based in large part on statements of drivers, car owners and others garnered from archived newspaper articles, this history details the development of stock car racing into a megasport, chronicling each season through 1974. It examines the National Association for Stock Car Automobile Racing's 1948 incorporation documents and how they differ from the agreements adopted at NASCAR's organization meeting two months earlier. The meeting's participants soon realized that their sport was actually owned by William H.G. "Bill" France, and its consequential growth turned his family into billionaires. The book traces the transition from dirt to asphalt to superspeedways, the painfully slow advance of safety measures and the shadowy economics of the sport.