Thorn Hill Dragstrip (Morning View)

History

Thorn Hill bills itself as the oldest continuously running drag strip in the country. Pomona, Bakersfield and some others are older, but they don’t run a regular schedule of continuous races. The eighth-mile strip is at 14114 Kenton Station Road in Morning View, near Kenton. Bootleggers built it during Prohibition as Thorn Hill Airfield, flying moonshine in a small plane. It opened as Thorn Hill Lake Drag Strip, run by a northern Kentucky car club that had been given tires to raffle off to get the strip going.

Ralph Payne ran the early strip. Dick Weinle, from Cincinnati, started racing there as a teenager in 1954 and remembered it as a dirt track then. The Valve Jumpers Club ran races in 1955, and the Motor Exploders car club managed it in 1956-57. The graded dirt was oiled to keep the dust down. The starting line was paved first, then more sections over the years, until the whole track was paved by 1958. A court-ordered noise ordinance from 1973 limits racing to six hours a week, on Saturdays. It’s a family-owned business, and in 2008 Gerald Meyer bought it and upgraded the burnout boxes.