Route #194 Drag Strip (Littlestown)

Nothing left

Also known as Dragway Rt. 194

Planned as a drag strip, but there's no sign it ever opened.

Listed in a 1968 Swedish magazine's directory of U.S. drag strips though it likely never opened

Raced: 1966-68
State: Pennsylvania
What's left: The site was never redeveloped, but every trace of the strip has been removed.
On the site today: Farmland, formerly a Christmas tree farm
Raced on: Built as a drag strip
Location: Off Route 194 by way of Christ Church Road, Littlestown, behind the church picnic grounds
People: Francis P. Smith, owner and builder (1966)
Elevation: 595 ft (182 m)
Coordinates: 39.76055, -77.06030

Francis P. Smith applied for a license to run Dragway Rt. 194 in early March 1966. On March 16 neighbors sued to keep him from opening a strip on their rural road, and the suit was dismissed. According to the article about the suit, the strip was reached from Route 194 by way of Christ Church Road in Littlestown. Barbara Brand, a librarian at the Adams County Library in Gettysburg, searched local papers and found nothing showing it ever opened, and she doubted it did. A 1968 list of U.S. drag strips in the Swedish magazine Start & Strip did include it. Smith ran a junkyard on his property by at least 1975 and died in Florida in 1982. A 1992 aerial photo shows a feature that may have been part of a strip. A local who went to school with Smith’s son Leon said the strip never opened. It was graded and got no further, then became a Christmas tree farm, the flattest one in the east, just behind the church picnic grounds. He believed the tree farm has since closed and the land is plain farmland now.

Possible site of the drag strip Christ Church Road on 1992 aerial photo

More in Pennsylvania