Jacksons Dragway/King's Dragway (South Butler)

Paul Jackson of rural South Butler raced as a hobby. He won the New York State Championships in 1955, took his car to that year’s NHRA nationals in Kansas City, and retired after winning the state title again in 1958. At 35, with a family, he had run a car dealership, a bar and grill, service stations and other businesses, but he wanted to build a drag strip at home. He leased a sandy old farm east of the center of town and put just under $100,000 into it, laying a foot of gravel over the sand and tons of macadam on top. According to track historian Mark Braccio, the quarter-mile strip opened in 1958, with two blacktop lanes split by a grass median and about an eighth mile of shutdown.

In 1959 Jackson ran about twenty dates averaging 120 entries, and by 1961 Sunday races drew about 300 cars, many from Rochester, Buffalo and farther. The strip was affiliated with NASCAR. He gave only trophies at first, then later in 1961 added small cash prizes for top speeds in a few classes. He built it for amateurs and wanted nothing to do with drivers who had to be paid to show up. He also backed powder puff racing, sometimes with 18 women’s classes. With South Butler making money, he took over the strips in Oswego and Dunkirk in April 1961, turning a hobby into a business. He had fun with it too, adding a greased pig contest for 2,400 spectators on May 14, 1961. A new 60-foot cement starting pad went in in April 1962 for traction, with new asphalt and a longer, better shutdown planned. In 1963 it raced Friday nights in summer as well as Sundays, with cash added to trophies. That year it joined the Timing Association of North America (TANA), a group of New York strips with Speedland at Canandaigua, Lancaster, Oswego and Milray, all speedway ovals except Lancaster.

Braccio, who announced at the strip in later years, said serious personal problems led Jackson to shut it down after about 1964. He started talking with Jake King about a sale in 1965, and King reopened it as King’s Dragway in 1966. In the mid-1970s the track went to eighth-mile racing. The Iron Horsemen held their annual motorcycle drags here in 2009 and 2010, when ads called it Warrick’s Drag Strip. The strip is on the north side of Butler-Conquest Road about 3/4 mile east of Highway 89 in South Butler. Some reports placed it in Savannah, just south.