NORTH WILKESBORO, N.C. -- Junior Johnson can remember North Wilkesboro Speedway when the infield was filled with rows of corn and the ticket booth was a chicken house.

Johnson dodged holes and dirt clods in his moonshine car, running the track before it was finished, and ran his first professional race there after it was done. He tested there two or three times a week during his prime and earned 18 of 50 career victories there.

	“	'I think someday someone will have a race there. But it's probably going to be after Bruton and I are in heaven or hell.'”
		—Bob Bahre

Now, five years after the last race at North Wilkesboro, Johnson feels like he's watching the slow, agonizing death of an old friend.

"I had a good rapport with that track, but a sadness comes over me when I think about the way it is now," said Johnson, who lives just a few miles away. "I look over at the racetrack and think what a disaster that is just sitting over there."

The speedway was mothballed after Bruton Smith and Bob Bahre each bought half of the track and took its two NASCAR races elsewhere.

The track's closing sent a county's economy into a tailspin and sideswiped the morale of the people who live there. Neither has fully recovered.

"It was like our Super Bowl," said North Wilkesboro Mayor Conley Call.

Jeff Gordon won the last race at North Wilkesboro, the Tyson Holly Farms 400 on Sept. 29, 1996.

Within four months, the track's employees were fired and the business office was closed because the two owners couldn't agree on what to do with the place.

Smith bought his half of the track from Jack Combs, whose brother Charlie was one of its original owners, in the summer of 1995 for a reported $6 million. He then took one of its NASCAR dates to then-new Texas Motor Speedway.

Smith says he didn't want to close the track, but won't operate it as a part owner because he fears the onus of running it will fall on his company, Speedway Motorsports Inc.

He had intended to buy the whole track but couldn't reach an agreement with the family of Enoch Staley, another of the track's original owners who died in 1995.

Mike Staley, Enoch's son, says Smith offered $2 million less than Bahre and wanted to buy the track with Speedway Motorsports stock, which the family wouldn't be permitted to sell for three years.

"It was not a good offer. We all looked at it and just walked away shaking our heads," Mike Staley said.

The Staley family sold its half to Bahre for $8 million in December 1995. Bahre took North Wilkesboro's other NASCAR date to New Hampshire International Speedway, which he owns.

Bahre said he didn't want the North Wilkesboro track to close either.

"He (Smith) doesn't want to do anything with me and I'm not going to sell him my half because I promised Mrs. Staley I wouldn't do that," Bahre said.

The staredown has left North Wilkesboro stranded like a rusted-out junker on blocks.

Billboards around the track are falling apart, including a Tyson chicken sign at the north end that reads like a broken eye chart. Grass grows through the cracks in the track's surface and paint is peeling in strips from the outside walls.

Signs on buildings and fences are so faded that grain from the wood and cinder blocks makes the letters difficult to read.

The bleachers in Junior Johnson Grandstand along the backstretch have bushes growing up through them, and a spotter's tower just before the final turn looks like a child's treehouse.

Nearly everyone in the region, from business owners to those who sold parking spots on their lawns, has felt the economic impact.

Hotels, motels and campgrounds took a hit. Churches and nonprofit organizations, which held their annual fundraisers during the races, felt the sting as well.

"It's a shame what's happened to a place that's meant so much to so many people and to NASCAR," said Norman Call, mayor of nearby Wilkesboro and Conley Call's cousin.

The towns of North Wilkesboro and Wilkesboro have made up some of the lost income with a variety of fairs and festivals, but it's been much tougher repairing morale.

Since it was built in 1947, North Wilkesboro Speedway had been the spiritual backbone of Wilkes County, giving it an international identity.

Conley Call, who often travels across the country and overseas, says people immediately ask about the speedway and Junior Johnson when they learn where he's from.

Losing the speedway turns Wilkes County into just another a place to get gas on the way to the mountains.

"People just kind of thought the races were going to be here forever," Johnson said. "It really hurt the morale of the people when it closed down. They were very disgusted, hurt and in disbelief that there wasn't going to be another race."

A lack of races hasn't kept fans from visiting what many consider the holy land of NASCAR.

While they don't come in carloads like they did in the first few years after the track closed, fans still come by a few times a week. Some camp out in the parking lot, as they did for races, while others stop just to get a glimpse of history.

"I had always seen it on TV and wanted to see it in person," said John Fawks, who stopped on his way back from Florida to his hometown of Omstead Falls, Ohio. "I wanted to take a picture and show everyone that I had been here."

North Wilkesboro's allure is history and atmosphere.

Johnson said he saw NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. unveil plans for his new venture in front of North Wilkesboro in 1947, and the track was the site for the final race of NASCAR's inaugural season two years later.

North Wilkesboro had 73 feature races in 57 years and was tread on by the greatest names in NASCAR history -- from Johnson in the early days, to Cale Yarborough and Richard Petty in the '70s and '80s, to Gordon and Dale Earnhardt in the years before it closed down.

Fans loved the .625-mile, low-banked oval for its rough racing and close finishes. Drivers loved the race week's down-home atmosphere.

Evenings in North Wilkesboro were like one big party, and many of the drivers could be found at barbecues with the fans or sitting in the back of a pickup in the parking lot of a motel talking with anyone who walked up.

"It was like a big fair, or like Disney World," Johnson said. "Everyone loved North Wilkesboro."

Johnson and community leaders say it's still not too late to bring North Wilkesboro back to life.

Although too small -- only about 40,000 seats -- to hold a Winston Cup race again, many think it's a perfect place to race Busch cars, trucks or even modifieds.

"It's not a dead issue to us -- we still talk about it all the time," Conley Call said. "We just need to find a way to get the owners to come together somehow."

An unlikely proposition.

"I think someday someone will have a race there," co-owner Bahre said. "But it's probably going to be after Bruton and I are in heaven or hell."