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Author and historian Daniel S. Pierce spent his boyhood summers roaming West Asheville barefoot in the 1960s. When he recalls those hot days, two sensations come to mind. The first is the feel of the cold linoleum beneath his feet inside the public library on Haywood Road.
“It was probably one of the few buildings that had air-conditioning in West Asheville,” he says. “I read a lot of books about sports [there].” He laughs. “I didn’t have much of a social life. Maybe it was because I was walking around barefoot.”
The second sensation Pierce recalls is the nighttime roar of engines coming from the New Asheville Speedway. Opened in 1960 on the banks of the French Broad River, the speedway saw legends like Richard Petty and Junior Johnson race on a 1/3-mile track paved in 1962. It was as notorious for fistfights among fans as it was for crashes among the drivers.
“My dad was a Baptist preacher,” Pierce says, “and it was unspoken that the speedway was not the kind of place that people like the Pierces went to.”
Pierce was almost 40 years old when he officially attended his first race. It was under the lights at the famed Bristol Motor Speedway.
“I hate to be sacrilegious,” he says, “but my conversion was like Paul’s on the road to Damascus. The whole experience just blew me away.”
photograph by Andrea Cheung
At the time, he was completing a Ph.D. in history at the University of Tennessee. His love for the subject had been kindled years earlier while exploring the library stacks in West Asheville. In graduate school, he studied under scholars whose work encouraged him to look homeward and consider the historical importance of the people and place from which he’d sprung.
“I was really influenced by folk history,” he says. “Great people and great events are important, but I was drawn to the lives of everyday people. It really opened my eyes to look at things like culture and religion and sports as windows into the past. That’s where I’ve been ever since.”
Pierce doesn’t just look through windows of the past for his own studies: He’s also spent years opening them for his students. For three decades, he was a member of the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where he taught courses on Appalachia that covered everything from white settlement to Native American removal to moonshining and snake handling.
Today, he’s known as a historian who works outside the classroom to engage with history in ways that inform the lives of North Carolinians. During the pandemic, he and his friend Steve Little, mayor of Marion, cofounded The RAIL Project. The organization is dedicated to studying the work of convict laborers — the vast majority of them Black men arrested on trumped-up charges — who built the railroad over the Blue Ridge Escarpment in the late 19th century.
Pierce is the author of numerous books on topics ranging from moonshine to the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but he is perhaps best known for his work on the history of NASCAR.
In the summer of 2003, not long after the New Asheville Speedway closed, he hosted a series of conversations about stock car racing in western North Carolina. The events featured legendary local drivers and retired photographers and reporters who’d long covered the sport. The series was held in the West Asheville Library, the same building where a young, barefoot Pierce had first experienced a sense of history that would eventually take him back to the tracks.
photograph by Matt Hulsman
For someone who didn’t attend his first speedway race until he was nearly 40, Daniel S. Pierce more than makes up for lost time in Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France. Pierce traces the evolution of the sport from its early days in the Piedmont, where mill workers from Appalachia chafed against the loss of their autonomy, finding an outlet in fast cars and illegal liquor. This combination led to the popularity of stock car racing. As street racing gave way to more formal speedway racing, countless characters began to pop up around the South. Pierce chronicles the rise of everyone from William “Big Bill” France Sr. to Glenn “Fireball” Roberts to Richard “The King” Petty alongside photographs that highlight the glory and chaos of racing from its infancy on dirt tracks to its corporatization at the Talladega 500.
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