Her father was a peach farmer who changed Rockingham racing forever. She remembers it all
Nancy DeWitt Daugherty seldom does this.
She makes that clear as she sifts through the memorabilia in what must be one of the coolest rooms in all of Richmond County. “Rarely” is the exact word she uses. And you can tell it’d been a while since she last descended to her basement by the way Daugherty, the soft-spoken daughter of one of Rockingham Speedway’s founders, carefully and quietly and fondly moves across the “Winston red” carpeting while discussing a treasure trove of NASCAR history in her own home.
“This was the program from the first race,” Daugherty says, pointing at a booklet through a glass case.
Oct. 31, 1965.
She then directs her attention to a green street sign labeled L.G. DeWitt Rd., named after her father, pasted up high on a thin white beam in her basement.
“That just showed up in my garage one day,” she says, giggling.
She then turns to the big sign mounted on the big wall that reads “The Rock” — the lettering that used to be on the interior tower, “where Tom Higgins and all the sportswriters” used to work on race day. She smiles and shrugs again:
“That just showed up in my garage, too.”
It’s true that the heart of racing in the sandhills of North Carolina is at the now-named Rockingham Speedway. That was on display Friday in a special way when a NASCAR race — the Truck Series race won by Tyler Ankrum — ran on the 1.017-mile oval for the first time since 2013. The Xfinity Series followed Saturday in that series’ first appearance at Rockingham since 2004.
And while all that’s unimpeachable, it may also be true that the soul of the history of racing at the Rockingham racetrack is scattered throughout Richmond County — in memories and homes and stories throughout the rural community — and that a hefty portion of it is with Daugherty. It’s in her basement, surrounded by the 1975 owner’s championship Daugherty’s father won; of photos of her and her daughters standing next to Dale Earnhardt and Benny Parsons and Richard Petty; of a racing flag with every Cup driver’s signature inscribed in the checkers.
She doesn’t say all that herself, of course.
She lets the history in her own house do the talking.
Daugherty is of direct lineage to perhaps the most important person in the Rockingham racetrack’s history. Her father, L.G. DeWitt, was one of the track’s first investors that helped Harold Brasington construct the racetrack in the early 1960s. DeWitt was president from 1972 to the year he died in 1990, and claimed ownership of the track somewhere in-between. After he died, his wife, Carrie, and his two daughters, Nancy and Jo, sold the racetrack to Roger Penske in 1997.
L.G. DeWitt was a peach farmer by trade. He had orchards from North Carolina down the East Coast, all the way to Florida. Daugherty’s home, she said, used to be a farmhouse, with a large orchard taking up the acres of cleanly cut grass that sit there now.
When you mine for stories of her past, of NASCAR and the racetrack her father built, you find a gold mine there, too.
“It was happiness,” she said. “I grew to love racing. You know, Daddy was a trucker. He didn’t like racing because that meant his drivers would want to stop at Darlington and watch the race instead of going up North. Because they loaded in Florida, and were supposed to deliver to New York and Washington and Baltimore. And it made him mad that they stopped and watched the race.”
She chuckled: “But when he got involved, he loved it.”
Daugherty said that her father was a proponent of giving all the business of the racetrack to the surrounding community. The plumbing was done by local hands. Local clubs planned their yearly budgets around when their members could work the concession stands. Hosting a NASCAR race was truly a community effort, she said — and it stayed that way after her sister, Jo, took over as president through 2002, two years before the last NASCAR Cup Series race there.
“People would sign up for vacation on the dates of the week before the race because they could work at the track and make extra money,” she said. “And to think: the people at the race bought gas. They might have to go to Belk and get a T-shirt or something. And they ate at the different eating places, and bought knick-knacks when they stopped at the service station. And they would fill the motel rooms.”
Daugherty is modest about her role in all of this. She’s proud of her family history, yes, and she loves keeping all the history under her roof, and she’s even writing a book about her childhood. (Though the book is mainly about the history of Ellerbe: “I’m just writing it for my grandchildren.”)
But even after a bunch of prodding — of wondering what it feels like to be the protector of her family’s history — the most she musters is, “I guess I’m the history person for my family.”
And that’s true.
What’s also true?
Her family’s history means a ton to the heart and soul of racing in Rockingham.
It always will.
This story was originally published April 19, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Her father was a peach farmer who changed Rockingham racing forever. She remembers it all."
