One of the rules of archaeology is, if you don't know what something is, ask a bunch of questions. When I spoke to the landowner later, he laughed as hard as I've ever seen a guy laugh. He knew what it was, all right. It just never occurred to him that it could be considered an archaeological site.
Old Fashioned Dirt Track Racing
The big oval depression was all that remained of the Marshalltown Speedway, a dirt-track raceway operated in this place from 1952 to 1954. According to the landowner, Hymie Rovner and Jim Moehr had leased the land from him in 1951 and built the track with a bulldozer themselves. The park had bleacher seating for 1,000. Protection for the crowd was a wall of railroad ties, placed on end and buried approximately 1/3 their length in front of the bleachers. The track had no outdoor lighting, and racing sessions were held during summer afternoons and early evenings. Liability insurance was purchased on a weekly basis from Lloyds of London, and the extravagant expense of that put an end to the race track after 1954.
Newspaper reports from the Marshalltown Times and Republican during the summer of 1952 touted stock car, hot rod, and bicycle races held on a twice-weekly basis, Wednesdays and Fridays, with special events on holidays. At first, the events drew "capacity crowds," and included up to a half dozen hot rod and stock car events, as well as local beauty queens on hand to congratulate the winners. By 1953, the races were only once a week during the summer, and by 1954 the added attractions of novelty acts--such as racers driving through a wall of fire with a passenger riding on the car hood--still didn't bring in adequate crowds.
Maybe Not NASCAR...
Dirt track car racing—also called stock car racing—was extremely popular during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and although NASCAR never sanctioned the Marshalltown Speedway at this location, its archives from the time period indicate that in many mid-size towns in the United States had their own "bull ring." Interestingly, there has been a recent upswing in interest in dirt track racing, and the Marshalltown Speedway has been rebuilt in town and, now sanctioned by the IMCA, it is described by the Marshalltown Visitor's Bureau as "Iowa's fastest high banked quarter-mile dirt oval."
The old Marshalltown Speedway is just a memory, now; unlike its older counterparts in Mesoamerica, there didn't seem to be a very good reason to redesign a highway around it. The comparison of Mesoamerican ball courts to American dirt track speedways may seem a bit of a stretch—but is it? At their cores, aren't all arena sports fulfilling at least part of the same human desires?
