Baton Rouge Dragway/State Capital Dragway (Erwinville)

Pipeline contractor W. O. Bergeron and his brother Al built this quarter-mile strip for $750,000 on U.S. 190, one mile east of Erwinville and ten miles from Baton Rouge. Pel State’s W. H. David and his wife Jayne operated it. Bergeron’s daughter rode horses, so a horse track with its own starting gate sat beside the drag strip. It was NHRA-sanctioned and lit for night racing from the start. The grand opening on Saturday, October 18, 1969, was the Louisiana State Championship with a $4,000 purse, and Preston Davis won Top Fuel in Ray Godman’s ‘Bo Weevil.’ Two weeks later Richard Tharp set the strip ET record at 6.73 in the Carroll Brothers-Bucher top fueler. The name changed to State Capital Dragway around 1972.

A short online history says Ned Betts acquired the track three years after it opened. Norman ‘Moose’ Pearah promoted there from 1971 and bought it in 1974 for $110,000, financed by the owners. He was the best known of its many owners and ran the NHRA Cajun Nationals there from 1977 to 1990. After the last Cajun Nationals and a default on loans against the property, NHRA bought it on the courthouse steps to keep it a drag strip. NHRA then found its quirks: no sewer system, a suites building sitting on an interstate gas pipeline, and a shutdown area that was leased from a neighbor. Allen Miller, Ken and Molly Hall and others leased or managed it before NHRA sold it.

It last ran as a quarter-mile track called State Capitol Raceway, under IHRA sanction from 2008 and WDRA in 2025, and closed after the 2025 season when the lease on the land under the top end was lost. Its website calls it the third-oldest continuously operating quarter-mile strip in the country, but more than a dozen are older, among them Alaska Raceway Park, Speedworld Raceway Park in Arizona, Redding Dragstrip and Sacramento Raceway Park in California, Bandimere and Julesburg in Colorado, Delmar U.S. 13 in Delaware, Palm Beach International Raceway in Florida, Firebird Raceway in Idaho, Cordova and Byron in Illinois, Cedar Falls Raceway in Iowa, Kansas International Dragway, and Mason-Dixon and Cecil County in Maryland.