Friendship Park Raceway/Steel Valley Dragway (Smithfield)

In fall 1973, Steubenville realtor Anthony D’Aurora proposed a drag strip in Friendship Park near Smithfield, saying he represented Youngstown interests ready to spend $250,000. A local resident asked the Jefferson County Commissioners to drop the idea. The site may have doubled as a drag strip and an airfield, since the Jefferson County Airport was built in 1972, and a 1973 topo map labeled the airport a drag strip. Bobby Johns is said to have been the first owner. James Abrams filed incorporation papers for Steel Valley Dragway on March 4, 1994, and Michael A. Zeno and Bobby Johns filed for Friendship Park Raceway on June 1, 1995.

The track closed in 2004-05 when the county stopped supporting it, and it was listed for sale in 2005. It was running again as Steel Valley Dragway by 2007. Keith Eckmeyer owned it from 2004 to 2012, when his health forced him to stop. That year April Galloway’s family stepped in to manage it under threat of closing. Her father had spent the previous five summers racing there. In 2013 the family leased the property and reopened it as Friendship Raceway, an eighth-mile outlaw track focused on bracket racing, still running in 2016. It became Freebird Dragway in 2018.