Jungle Park Speedway: The Forgotten and Dangerous Racetrack of Indiana
Only bits and pieces of the once bustling Jungle Park Speedway remain. But the signs, once you see them, are unmistakable.
“There's this grandstand, big old wooden grandstand in the woods, and you think, ‘what is this doing here? What could people have been looking at?’ You realize there's some banking here and it looks manmade. This is an oval, this is a racetrack,” says journalist Will Higgins.
The races at this half-mile oval were vast, wild, and extremely dangerous for drivers and spectators alike.
“Even for a racetrack in the 30s, it was dangerous. There were trees around it. The fans were standing about 15 feet away from where the race car's groove was. Spectators were injured and killed not that infrequently, but back then the value of life was very different than it is now. A spectator gets killed, but who won the race?” explains Higgins.
That very thing happened in the summer of 1928. The headlines announced the winner of the race, and a paragraph later got around to mentioning the death of one Mrs. Charles Kiger. She wouldn't be the last person to meet their end at Jungle Park.
A Dangerous Era of Dirt Track Racing
The track was the brainchild of a young entrepreneur from rural Boone County named Earl Padgett.
Higgins states, “He bought some land down in Parke County, and by 1926 it had a dirt track and people started pouring into it. Thousands of people at a time. They sent and paid a dollar to watch these cars go 100 miles an hour on dirt. It must have been just breathtaking.”
On a good day, around 5,000 people would crowd around the fences to watch the races at Jungle Park. Firsthand accounts note the wild atmosphere at the track.
Robert Dicks, a lifelong racing enthusiast describes, “It was rowdy and crowded. I was like four or five years old. I remember the drinking was heavy and people drank beer, long necks. One car went off the track on the backstretch, flipped and caught on fire. Back then, they didn't have much safety equipment. People ran and put the fire out with their beer.”
And it wasn't just a crowd that was unruly. Even the organizers weren't really living up to their titles. Jack Shanklin raced there back in the 50s.
“I turned over between turns three and four during qualifying. There was no guardrail or nothing. I went over the bank,” driver Jack Shanklin notes. “It wasn't at all organized. They didn't even have a stopwatch. They were supposed to be using a stopwatch for qualification, and the guy had a silver dollar, acting like he had a stopwatch.”
From Thrilling Spectacle to Tragic End
Jungle Park wasn't the premier racing venue of its day. That one was some 60 miles to the east. But it was a stepping stone for a number of world-class drivers.
“The Jungle Park was the very minor leagues of racing. Like baseball, you started in the farm teams, the Triple-A, Double-A, Single-A, that kind of thing and worked your way up. A handful of very top drivers did come through Jungle Park. Indy 500 winners Wilbur Shaw, for instance, raced at Jungle Park, but once he won the [Indy] 500, he wasn't going to race again at Jungle Park because everybody knew it was exceptionally dangerous,” says Higgins.
While the danger was certainly part of the draw, it was also likely part of what brought it to an end.
“Other tracks that come along, and so it was copied in many little towns. The crowds were getting smaller and smaller. In 1955, it basically went away,” Higgins states. “But five years later, they decided to try it one more time.”
This last hurrah proved Jungle Park was too dangerous for mid-century Americans.
“Fans came like they used to come. There was a crash. A woman who was on a blanket watching the race and moved to get out of the way of it, but did not get out of the way of it, was crushed and she died. That was pretty much it for Jungle Park,” says Higgins.
“By 1960, our whole concept of life and death had changed from 1926, and we weren't as comfortable with it as we had been earlier,” Higgins explains. “So that pretty much was the end of it.”
Now, the old grandstands and a state historical marker are all the remains of this once bustling racetrack.
“There was a time when thousands of people walked around here, and there was all this action going on here. And then people just walked away from it and left it as it is. And there it is, just rotting away. It's haunting, and it's beautiful to me in a way,” concludes Higgins.
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The above video is a clip from Journey Indiana from WTIU. You can watch more segments and full episodes at pbs.org/show/journey-indiana/
