Beech Bend Raceway Park (Bowling Green)

History

Beech Bend Raceway Park is a complex with a paved 1/3-mile oval and an NHRA quarter-mile drag strip, inside the Beech Bend Amusement Park near Bowling Green. The strip’s early years are poorly documented, and sources disagree on when it opened. Race track historian Allan E. Brown said a quarter-mile dirt drag strip ran from 1951 through 1954, but a 1954 aerial photo shows no strip on the property. An August 12, 1956, Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer article by sports editor Russ Melvin shows there was no strip before 1956, reporting that the track had decided to build one, to be finished by September 1, and would hold drag races alongside its regular oval program. Charley Garvin, owner of the 400-acre amusement complex, got it ready for the first race on September 23, 1956. Garvin told the paper that, alarmed by drag racing accidents on the highways, he figured it was better to bring the racing into the open, set rules and control it on a special strip. The Black Hawks Rods and Customs club from Franklin won more than forty trophies that first season.

According to the Nashville Tennessean, the 1957 season opened on April 14 with about fifty cars from Kentucky, Tennessee and Indiana, and Robert Burris of Franklin, Kentucky, won top eliminator in his ‘57 Mercury super stocker. A 1959 article said Garvin had built a half-mile dirt strip, a quarter mile for racing and a quarter for shutdown, beside his 1/3-mile dirt oval. At first only 15 to 20 local cars raced, with no trophies, just the satisfaction of winning. By 1959 it drew about 150 racers from three or four states, and rising speeds had led to stretching the strip to over a mile. The first 6/10 mile was paved in 1958, with plans to pave the rest. Each week $300 was split among the winners of four eliminator categories, with trophies for nineteen classes, and the track record was just over 11 seconds. The first Kentucky Open Drag Racing Championship on October 18, 1959, paid $700, the biggest purse ever offered in the state.

David Garvin managed the track in the early 1970s, racing every Sunday from March through September. At an NHRA national event on May 27, 1979, a fight broke out when a man was dragged from his van and badly beaten. His van was burned and pushed into a river, police were pelted with rocks and bottles, and 88 people were arrested in what newspapers called rioting.