An iconic North Texas venue is closing its doors after 50 years.
Mesquite’s Devil’s Bowl Racetrack is holding its final races this weekend, five decades after the Edwards family built the venue on the 89-acre property.
“It’s bittersweet,” Lanny Ross Edwards, son of the track’s founder, told NBC 5 DFW, adding, “… 50 years is a long time. I don’t think anyone in the country or the world that can say they owned one for 50 years, run it every week, every season, privately owned.”
His father, the elder Lanny Edwards, bought the land as an abandoned rock quarry in the 1970s and built it into the track it is today with the help of friends and family. Over the years, the half-mile, 10,000-seat track has become a mainstay in the World of Outlaws circuit, hosting weekly races despite previous opportunities for the family to sell.
“Daddy told me on his deathbed he said: Son, that land out there is going to get so valuable that there will come a day that you can’t afford not to sell it,” Lanny told NBC 5.
After five decades, that time has come, he said, in part because of the development in the surrounding area. The growth has been looming over the track for a while now.
“They’re putting 15,000 [houses] right down the road with the lagoon,” Lanny explained. “They say 190, Highway 190 is going to go right through that building and you can’t stop progress. You can’t. They’ve got a plan. That plan’s going to happen no matter what.”
Martin Edwards, a co-owner of the Devil’s Bowl his grandfather founded, shared a similar sentiment in an interview with The Dallas Express.
“We always kind of suspected [the catalyst for the track’s sale would] be the highway because when [the elder Lanny Edwards] first bought the property, that was kind of the plan at the time,” Martin said. “Loop nine, which is now I-90, was supposed to come through. That never happened, but I can’t even count how many times my grandfather sat there at the bar and told me, ‘It’s not going to happen in my lifetime, it might not happen in your dad’s, but it will happen in yours.’”
“He’d been a hustler and a business person his entire life, so he knew what the future was going to hold better than any of us,” he added. “He always [taught] me to be prepared to make a smart business decision because it doesn’t affect just me.”
As it turns out, the decision would ultimately fall on Martin’s father, with input from other family members. The news of the closing has not been taken well by some: Martin noted that some have accused the family of being greedy on social media.
“We understand that this place means a lot to a lot of people in more ways than it just being a racetrack,” he told The Dallas Express. “We don’t take that lightly because it’s way more than that to us.”
The Devil’s Bowl will close after this weekend’s World of Outlaw Sprint Car Series — Sprint Car Stampede, dubbed “The Final Stampede.”
