Oswego Drag Raceway

Wally Smith and his brother Dan built this strip on Wally’s farm on Highway 34, a mile west of the Oswego Bridge. It began as dirt and was paved by 1956 at the latest. NHRA picked Oswego for a midwestern regional championship on September 29-30, 1956, which drew 10,000 spectators. Night racing started in 1958. In late August 1961, Nook Bakewell drove Arfons’s “Green Monster” to a track record of 181 mph in 7.8 seconds. In 1971 Sunday races from March to early November drew as many as 400 entries. A full-page Chicago Tribune story that year said you could spot the strip from a quarter mile away as a gap of about 100 yards in the endless corn, with a half-mile two-lane blacktop down the middle, the steward’s booth at one end and a turnaround onto a gravel road at the other. Robert Doss managed the track in 1972, when it was one of eight tracks owned by National Drag Racing Enterprises. Dr. Howard Koch bought the raceway in late 1976. A nursing home later bought the land, ending a quarter century of drag racing at Oswego.