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Off Route 46 in Great Meadows, past the farm stands and the Pequest River, there’s a quarter-mile of asphalt that once made history and somehow refuses to become history itself.
Island Dragway isn’t a museum. It’s a working track that still packs the lanes most weekends from March through November with everything from junior dragsters to diesel trucks. It runs on the same 43 acres a Warren County farmer carved out of his own land more than sixty years ago – and it is the only dragstrip left in NJ.
From Farmland to the Fast Lane
Drag racing rolled east from California in the late 1950s, and Edward Kowalick wanted a piece of it. He and his wife Catherine owned a farm in Great Meadows. The family story goes that he was deciding between a golf course and a racetrack. He chose the louder option. “We’re going to bring this drag racing stuff to the east coast,” he reportedly said, and by 1960 the first cars were staging.
Even the name carries two origin stories, and no one left alive can settle the argument. One version traces it back to the 1800s, when the marshy stretch was called Rose Island and the Kowalick property was known as Island Farm. The other is more practical: the land sits ringed by drainage ditches and the Pequest River, making it, in a modest New Jersey way, an island. Either explanation works. The name stuck. So did the track.
The Night Drag Racing Broke 200
On August 2, 1964, “Big Daddy” Don Garlits rolled Swamp Rat VI into the lanes for a match race against the Frantic Four, a West Coast team that had been flirting with the 200 mph mark. Garlits ran a 7.78-second pass at 201.34 mph. It was the first officially recognized 200 mph run in drag racing history, and it happened on a strip that had been a cornfield not long before.
Fifty years later, almost to the day, Garlits came back. He drove Swamp Rat 6B down the same pavement for a victory lap while the stands filled up again. Places that earn that kind of loyalty are rare. Places that keep earning it for six decades are rarer still.
How It Almost Didn’t Make It
The track’s survival has never been guaranteed. Hurricane Irene flooded it in 2011 and Sandy did the same in 2012. By the end of that year, Kathy DeMarcky – Edward and Catherine’s daughter and the second-generation owner – closed the gates.
Most tracks that shut down stay shut. The land is usually worth more as warehouses or houses, and the cost of coming back is brutal.
Island Dragway came back. Melissa Milano, Kathy’s daughter, who once worked the concession stand and raced junior dragsters herself, took over with her husband Carl. They reopened for the Fourth of July weekend in 2013 and have been going since.
New Jersey’s Last One Standing
For years New Jersey had options. Englishtown Raceway Park stopped drag racing after 2017. Atco Dragway, the older of the two major strips, closed for good in July 2023 after 63 years. When Atco went dark, Island Dragway became the only operating quarter-mile left in the state. If you want a time slip anywhere near New Jersey now, this is it.
The next closest options sit in New Hampshire and Maryland.
Track announcer Hank Dinger, who’s been calling races here since 1966, puts it plainly: noise complaints and rising land values are quietly killing drag strips across the country. A track that was there first gets surrounded by new houses. Someone complains. An ordinance follows. Or a developer shows up with an offer that makes racing look like a bad business decision. Island Dragway is still here because the family that owns it has refused, more than once, to let either force win.
What’s Actually Happening There Now
It’s an active weekly track. Test & Tune runs Friday nights (gates at 6, racing 7 to 11) and on weekend days. Friday nights also host the Gamblers Series, a pure bracket format where the pot goes to the last one standing. Weekends bring points races, nostalgia shows for cars 30 years and older, diesel truck days, and import meets.
The junior dragster program is currently dominated by girls – sisters racing sisters. Melissa calls it the future of the sport, and she’s not wrong. Spectator admission sits around $18–20, kids under 12 get in free, and military and veterans get a discount. Racer fees range from about $50 for the junior and trophy classes up to $90 for Super Pro. The schedule shifts, and they take Labor Day weekend off, so check islanddragway.com before you drive out.
They run three different finish lines depending on the class: 660 feet for the juniors, 1,000 feet on certain Super Pro days, and the full 1,320-foot quarter mile for everyone else. The surface has been rebuilt more than once since 1960. The place itself hasn’t moved.
New Jersey used to have real choices if you wanted to watch a quarter-mile or make one yourself. Now it has one. Twenty Island Road, Great Meadows. Gates open most weekends through November. Go see the track that broke 200 mph when it wasn’t supposed to be possible—and that is still, somehow, the only one left standing.
📍20 Island Road, Great Meadows
Sources: Inside Warren, New Jersey Digest, BangShift, This Day In Automotive History, Explore Warren, the Philadelphia Inquirer, NJ 101.5, Wikipedia (Atco Dragway), islanddragway.com.
