You have driven past it. Everyone in Carpentersville has driven past it, probably a few hundred times, on the stretch of Route 31 between Algonquin and West Dundee where the road cuts through a patch of woods with a white silo standing just off the shoulder. Most people register it the way you register a water tower or a grain elevator: a landmark you stopped seeing years ago. It has a name, Raceway Woods, and a small brown park sign, and if you have ever pulled in you probably assumed it was exactly what it looks like. A forest preserve. Trails, trees, maybe a good spot to let the dog run.
It is also, underneath the second-growth trees, the most complete road racing circuit left standing in the country. Not a replica. The actual pavement.
What the Silo Doesn't Tell You
The land was a racetrack first. Developer Leonard Besinger built Meadowdale International Raceway in 1958, laying a 3.27-mile road course across the highway from a housing subdivision he was putting up along the Fox River, on the theory that a race track would help sell houses. He modeled it on European circuits rather than the ovals most American tracks favored at the time: long straights, heavy braking zones, and a steeply banked 180-degree corner known as the Monza Wall. The silo predates all of it. It shows up in aerial photos from 1939, decades before anyone raced a car past it, and it only got its racetrack paint job once Meadowdale opened.
The opening weekend did not go well. A fatal crash during the inaugural events gave the track a reputation it never shook, and combined with dust storms that blinded drivers and clogged parking that stranded spectators on the shoulder of Route 31, Meadowdale spent its whole decade fighting a "killer" label. That reputation didn't keep the talent away. Over its ten years of operation, drivers who raced at Meadowdale included Roger Penske, Mark Donohue, Bobby Unser, Al Unser, Carl Haas, Fred Lorenzen, and Peter Revson, and the track's last major event, a Sports Car Club of America Trans-Am race on July 7, 1968, was won by Donohue in a Penske-owned Camaro. It never turned a profit. By 1969 it was abandoned.
Twenty-Five Years of Nothing, Then a Choice
Here is the part that makes Raceway Woods unusual. Most abandoned racetracks get bulldozed for subdivisions or industrial parks, or they just decay past recognition. Meadowdale sat untouched for twenty-five years, and when local park districts finally bought the land in 1994, purchasing the north 90 acres first and the remaining acreage in 2002 to bring the preserve to its current 122 acres, they made a decision that a lot of park boards wouldn't have: they kept the track.
Not as a museum piece behind a fence. As the trail. The 2.7-mile loop that winds through Raceway Woods today follows the original racing line, and the segments still carry their racing names on trail markers: the Long Straight, the Uphill Climb, Little Monza, Greg's Corkscrew. That 2.7 miles is shorter than the original 3.27-mile circuit for a straightforward reason. The Monza Wall itself, the track's signature banked corner, was torn down before the 1968 season for safety reasons, and the acreage the park districts bought in stages never fully restored every original foot of pavement. What's left is still enough to walk the shape of a real Grand Prix-style circuit, past a Pure Oil silo that has now outlasted the raceway it once advertised by nearly sixty years.
One historian writing about the site called it what it plainly is: the only intact "ghost track" in the United States.
The One Day a Year It's Allowed to Be a Track Again
For 364 days a year, Raceway Woods behaves like any other Kane County forest preserve. Hikers, mountain bikers, birdwatchers. Then, once a year, the Midwest Racing Preservation Association turns the pavement back into what it was built to be.
This year's Meadowdale Motorsports & Memories Car Show, the 18th annual, is scheduled for Saturday, September 12, 2026, at Raceway Woods. It is the one day cars are permitted back onto the original track surface. Registration for show cars runs through the morning, judging and the car show itself run roughly 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. rain or shine, and trophies go out in the afternoon. Show cars enter from the Route 31 silo entrance, while spectator parking is across the highway at what used to be the raceway's original entrance, a detail that matters if you've never been and don't want to circle the block looking for the right driveway. Entry fees have run in the range of $15 to $20 per car in recent years, with a modest discount for pre-registering, though the exact numbers shift year to year, so anyone planning to bring a car is better off checking MiRPA's website directly before showing up.
If you're not bringing a car, you can still walk the same ground the show cars will be parked on, which is a different experience than hiking it on an ordinary Tuesday. The preserve's competitive streak also shows up on the calendar in a quieter way the rest of the year, through an annual mountain bike race called the Raceway Rally that uses the same infield trails.
What Follows, One Week Later
The next Saturday on the Carpentersville calendar looks nothing like the car show. The Village's Fall Fest lands on September 19, and where Meadowdale Motorsports & Memories is about vintage sheet metal and a track most people have never set foot on, Fall Fest is kid's attractions, fall activities, and a DJ, the kind of half-day event built for families who want pumpkins and a bounce house rather than a walking tour of a 1958 road course. You can find the current details on the Village of Carpentersville's events page.
Two Saturdays, back to back, pulling from completely different parts of the same community. One draws people who drove in from three counties over because they read about the ghost track online. The other draws the families who live three blocks from Carpenter Park and show up because it's what September looks like here.
Why This Is Worth Knowing If You Already Live Here
The easy version of this story is "hidden gem," and that undersells it. What actually makes Raceway Woods worth a second look isn't that it's pretty, plenty of Kane County preserves are pretty, it's that the Village chose to preserve the evidence instead of erasing it. Most communities that inherit a failed, faintly embarrassing piece of infrastructure quietly pave over it. Carpentersville let the track lines stay under the leaves, named the trail segments after what they used to be, and built an entire annual tradition around letting the pavement remember what it was built for.
That means the same stretch of Route 31 you've driven past without a second thought is doing double duty: forest preserve on the ordinary days, and once a year, briefly, a working piece of American motorsport history. You don't need to own a vintage Corvette to notice that. You just need to actually turn into the lot.
If you're weighing what else this corner of the Fox River Valley has going for it, whether that's schools, commute times, or simply what a neighborhood feels like day to day, Zamudio Realty Group has spent years getting to know Carpentersville block by block. Reach out anytime you want a local's read on the area, or start with a free home valuation if you're curious what your corner of it is worth right now.
