Raymond Parks, Roy Hall and the Elliotts: Dawsonville’s road to NASCAR

Dawsonville’s link to NASCAR runs through a handful of people. Raymond Parks, a Dawson County native, paid for the cars. His cousins Roy Hall and Lloyd Seay drove them. Parks’s mechanic, Red Vogt, named the sanctioning body in 1947, and Red Byron won its first championships in a Parks car. “Many observers consider Dawsonville one of the birthplaces of NASCAR,” the New Georgia Encyclopedia says, and this is why.

The festival in Dawsonville, Georgia, exists partly to tell this story. Kare for Kids says the Mountain Moonshine Festival celebrates the county’s Prohibition-era moonshining and its connection to the formation of NASCAR. Here are the people behind that line (Kare for Kids makes the festival connection; the history below is from the New Georgia Encyclopedia, NASCAR and the museum).

The cars came first

During and after Prohibition, in the 1920s and early 1930s, Dawson County was an active place for making and hauling moonshine, per the encyclopedia’s Dawson County entry. Its moonshine entry goes further: moonshiners in Dawson ran millions of gallons of whiskey into Atlanta.

The haulers were called trippers. In Dawson, Union and other counties they built fast “tanker cars,” most often 1940 Fords, to outrun revenuers. Stock car racing grew out of those cars and those chases. The drivers who were good at one turned out to be good at the other.

Raymond Parks, the money

Parks was a Dawson County native who became a well-known Atlanta liquor-store owner. He seldom drove in races himself. What he did was finance many of the most important early racers, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia. In 2016, NASCAR announced Parks for its Hall of Fame Class of 2017, joining fellow Dawsonville native Bill Elliott, the Dawson County News reported.

Roy Hall and Lloyd Seay, the drivers

In 1938 Parks’s moonshine-running cousins, Roy Hall and Lloyd Seay, both from Dawson County, talked him into bankrolling their racing. Hall is remembered in Jim Croce’s song “Rapid Roy, That Stock Car Boy.”

Seay’s story ended early. In 1941 he was fatally shot by his cousin Woodrow Anderson in an argument over a shipment of sugar, per the encyclopedia. He was later among the first inductees of the Georgia Racing Hall of Fame.

Red Vogt names it

Parks and his mechanic, Red Vogt, both took part in the 1947 meetings at the Streamline Hotel in Daytona Beach, Florida, that created the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. Vogt came up with the name. So the name itself came from Raymond Parks’s mechanic.

Red Byron and Gober Sosebee

Parks-owned, Vogt-prepared cars dominated NASCAR’s early years. The Georgia Racing Hall of Fame says Red Byron and car owner Raymond Parks became the first champions of the newly formed NASCAR series in 1948 and won again in 1949. The museum displays a replica of Byron’s 1948 car.

The same team helped launch Dawsonville native Gober Sosebee. The museum displays a Ford it describes as Sosebee’s Daytona 500-winning car.

Bill Elliott: Awesome Bill from Dawsonville

Bill Elliott was born in Dawsonville on October 8, 1955, per the encyclopedia’s Bill Elliott entry. His run in the late 1980s earned him the nickname “Awesome Bill from Dawsonville.” In 1985 he won 11 races and a $1 million bonus, which made him “Million Dollar Bill.” He won the 1988 Winston Cup championship and had 44 career wins by 2003. The National Motorsports Press Association named him its Most Popular Driver a record 16 times.

NASCAR voted him into its Hall of Fame Class of 2015 with 87% of the vote, the highest in that class. His first Cup win came at Riverside in 1983, and that win started a Dawsonville tradition. When it happened, Pool Room owner Gordon Pirkle plugged in an old fire-station siren, carried it outside and let it roar, as NASCAR.com told it in 2014.

The Thunderbird in our header photo is Bill Elliott’s 1987 car. It lives at The Henry Ford museum in Michigan, not in Dawsonville.

Chase Elliott and the siren

Bill’s son Chase Elliott won the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series championship with his fifth win of that season, at Phoenix Raceway. He drives the No. 9 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports, and he was named the Cup Series’ Most Popular Driver every year from 2018 through 2025, per NASCAR. The Dawsonville Pool Room says it sounds its siren for every Chase Elliott NASCAR victory, the tradition his father started.

Who is in which hall

Dawsonville has two halls of fame, and they get mixed up.

The Dawson County News reported in 2014 that the moonshiners’ hall was set up in 2013 with inductions held during the festival’s opening ceremony. This year that ceremony is at 11 a.m. Saturday, October 24, per the Kare for Kids flyer. That time is as published by Kare for Kids and subject to change; confirm at kareforkids.org.

Seeing it in person

Outside the Hall of Fame stands the Hemphill Service Station, which the museum ties to Raymond Parks. Inside are the Elliott Family Room, Bill Elliott’s first Cup-winning car from Riverside in 1983, the engine from his 1985 Winston Million car, and Chase Elliott’s 2020 championship trophy. On festival Saturday the old cars come out too: the 10 a.m. parade of historical race cars is led by 2026 Grand Marshal Danny “Chocolate” Myers, and parade cars stay parked in town all weekend. Plan your visit with our Hall of Fame guide, then take the racing landmarks walk to the Pool Room. For the moonshine side of the story, read our moonshine history page, and for the festival’s own race cars, see the Moonshine Run and parade.

Questions people ask

Written by the Dawsonville Moonshine Festival Guide Editorial Team. AI tools help us draft; people check every fact before it publishes.