World-Famous French Lick Speedway? It Was Once a Thought

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The French Lick Springs Hotel property in the early 1900s looked quite a bit different than today, with a horse track and baseball field on site.


The “French Lick 500” kinda has a nice ring, doesn’t it?

In the spirit of the 104th running of the Indianapolis 500 this weekend, here’s another tidbit of French Lick’s colorful history you may not have known: At one time, French Lick was briefly considered as a site for building the state’s famed motor speedway.

Back in 1903, Carl Fisher of Indianapolis started working toward his vision of building a large race track long and wide enough to safely hold automobile races. The narrow dirt horse tracks of the era couldn’t support such a race. And Fisher was thinking big. Like 800 acres type of big. And a track of 3 to 5 miles in circumference — bigger than the 2½-mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway that was eventually built in 1909.

Carl Fisher (left) and
Tom Taggart (right)
At the time, Tom Taggart had acquired the French Lick Springs Hotel property a few years earlier and was in the process of expanding the hotel and adding to the property. Taggart certainly saw the potential for attracting guests with a world-class track. And with deep ties to Indianapolis as the former mayor of the city, Taggart invited Fisher to give French Lick a look when Fisher was scouting sites to build the track of his dreams.

In 1904 and 1905, Fisher visited here and looked at locations in and near French Lick. James Vaughn’s Book “The Dome in the Valley” quotes a December 1905 article from The Automobile magazine that mentions French Lick’s place in the process:

“A movement is on foot in Indiana, backed by prominent automobile people, to establish a five-mile automobile track in Indiana. It is planned to make the track one of the finest in the world. An effort was made to secure an option on the old horserace track at French Lick, but it failed.”


The first running of the Indianapolis 500 in 1911.


Ultimately, French Lick was ruled out because enough level land could not be secured for a chunk of land that size. So the ambitious vision of a speedway in French Lick never really got too far off the ground. (And, if you’ve ever sat in race-day gridlock in Indianapolis, you can only imagine what the traffic would be like getting in and out of our little community.)

But, it is fun to think about — morning tailgating, that unmistakable buzz of IndyCar engines, and the highest-attended sporting event in the world, right here in French Lick.