The Derby Lane Greyhound Track Collection comes to the Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center

Sometimes you can be so busy with the bustle of the day-to-day that you can forget the fact that each day adds to a living history. Louise Weaver, whose family’s business was the Derby Lane Greyhound Track in St. Petersburg, Florida, remarkably attended to both.

Through a lifetime of work, Weaver built and maintained a collection of Derby Lane’s photographs, scrapbooks, racing programs, artifacts, and much more. She has now donated this collection to the NC State University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC), where this unparalleled record will become accessible to researchers interested in the history of animals in society and American culture. The finding aid to the collection can be viewed here.

Derby Lane was the oldest continuously operating greyhound track in the United States. Opened in 1925 as the St. Petersburg Kennel Club, the track weathered the Great Depression and the wartime years, welcomed locals and celebrities, and hosted the richest-ever greyhound race—the Derby Lane Million—in which the winning dog took home a $500,000 purse in 2006 and 2007.

Derby Lane’s history is the history of greyhound racing itself, from its origins through its modernization and heyday to its decline in popularity in more recent years. Floridians passed Amendment 13 in 2018, banning greyhound racing in the state, and Derby Lane ran its last race in December 2020. It remains open for its poker room and racing simulcasting.

Weaver built this record of the track’s lifespan because she lived some of it. Her family owned and operated the track, and she grew up in its grandstand, paddock, restaurants, and offices, helping run the business full-time starting in 1991. But she also studied art history and applied its preservation practices to the track, meticulously gathering and cataloging its records from stray boxes in closets and hallways into a thoroughly documented and researched collection that stands as perhaps the best telling of the story of the sport of greyhound racing through the lens of one popular track.

“I like to put things in order and label them, and I also indulge in art history and culture. To come across piles of those photographs dating back to 1925—it's just astounding that nothing had been done with them,” Weaver says of the beginnings of the collection.

“Nothing was dated. Most things did not have labels, and so it was slow going at first, just trying to put pictures in piles that I thought at least were in the same decade. And dating pictures by whatever clue I could find in the photographs that would have a time indicator to it—like cars and different aspects of the track. For example, the odds board was down at the first turn, up until a certain year.”

Weaver hired a librarian friend with whom she had worked in Washington D.C at the National Archives and the National Museum of American Art. Over a year together, they implemented the Library of Congress cataloging system at the track, using index cards and sorted back through racing programs dating to the track’s opening. After the librarian left, Weaver continued that work.

“By reviewing the programs very meticulously and carefully, you can plot each greyhound as they progressed here. And that's how I found pictures of the trainers and kennel owners and a lot of people who just worked in the kennels for the trainers,” Weaver says. “That's how the collection came about, very laboriously, very slowly.”

“We had the only archives in the country besides the Greyhound Hall of Fame, and theirs is not indexed. So the fact that my archives were indexed was a big help. And, you know, word got out that we did have it. And that's when Gwynn called me.”

Gwynn Thayer, Associate Head and Chief Curator at the SCRC, was a graduate student at the time and writing her dissertation, which has since been published as Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture by the University Press of Kansas (2013). Weaver’s orderly collection provided crucial records of the sport’s cultural beginnings, such as photographs of Babe Ruth posing with a winning greyhound at a trophy presentation in Derby Lane’s first year and bikini-clad beauty pageant queens presenting winning purses to dogs. While researching at Derby Lane, Thayer gave Weaver advice on archives more broadly, and they’ve been in touch ever since.

“When we finished greyhound racing, I called Gwynn up and asked her if she knew where the collection could go, and she said ‘Yeah—here.’ I’m very happy that it’s at NC State University for not only the memory of greyhound racing, but because it guarantees the preservation of those records for anyone interested in this particular culture.”

“It's a one-in-a-million collection,” Thayer says. “There's no other collection intact like it that really documents the whole life cycle of one dog track in this country.”

“Add to that the fact that someone at the track was methodical for many, many years about collecting documentation about the operation of the dog track—and I'm not talking about the pari-mutuel gambling records. I mean more the things that we’re actually interested in collecting at the SCRC anyway—various components about the role of animals, whether it's in agriculture or entertainment or other areas. I think there's definitely an intersection with questions about animal welfare too, but it's really more than that. It's also a lot about popular culture and American history and animals in society, and I think that's fair to what we do at a land grant institution where we do a lot with animals.”

The collection adds a unique aspect to the SCRC’s holdings. It also stands as a testament to Weaver’s dedication, which Thayer continues to marvel at.

"It's amazing, her librarian impulse to collect from the beginning,"  Thayer says. "So many people, especially when it's a family operation, are just running it day-by-day. They don't worry about saving the artifacts or photographs or papers, or even have time to think about where they are going to put it all. They are more inclined to say, 'Just get it out of here!' That's so often the case, but then once you have a few years under you, you start maybe having those thoughts that you should probably preserve some of these records because this seems like it's going to last. But Louise was on it from the start.”

For Weaver, the collection coming to the SCRC means that so many of the stories she lived through and the people and dogs she knew won’t be lost. The “dogmen” who could tell you the entire breeding history of every dog from memory have that memory preserved in the stud books in the collection. The trainers who rose at 5:00 a.m. to feed the greyhounds and work them out on the track at sunrise smile out of photographs that have now found a home. And the photographs and records of the canine athletes themselves—Weaver is relieved that these characters, and the track that they brought to life, now have a permanent place in history.

“When it's gone, it’s gone,” Weaver says. “And the only record will be at the NC State University Libraries and the Greyhound Hall of Fame.”

The Special Collections Research Center is open by appointment only. Appointments are available Monday–Friday, 9:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. and Saturday, 1:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. For appointments, please email: library_specialcollections@ncsu.edu