The race track near Ovid that spent the war as a POW camp

The grandstand on M-21 west of Ovid has heard two very different kinds of crowd. One came to watch stock cars throw dirt. The other was held there under guard.

Owosso Speedway opened in 1939 as a quarter-mile dirt oval out in the farm country of Middlebury Township, the sort of half-rural track where local men in patched-up coupes raced on summer nights. Then the war swallowed the gasoline, the tires, and the young men, and the racing stopped. In 1944 the fenced, isolated speedway grounds got drafted into a different job: a prisoner-of-war camp for captured German soldiers, many of them taken in North Africa. They were housed right on the speedway property, and — this is the part that surprises people — they were let out into the surrounding farms to work, picking crops and doing odd jobs for Shiawassee County families short on hands while their own sons were overseas. For a couple of growing seasons, the men weeding the sugar beets up the road might have been Rommel’s.

When the war ended the prisoners went home, and in 1946 the track came back louder than before — a new, high-banked half-mile of asphalt sharing its front stretch with the old quarter-mile dirt. Over the decades the surface flipped between dirt and pavement and the shape kept changing, until a 1988 rebuild gave it the 3/8-mile progressively banked asphalt oval it runs on now, the higher lanes pitched steeper than the low groove.

It’s still going. On a Saturday night you can sit in those stands and watch late models and modifieds chase each other around banking that didn’t exist when German prisoners were bunked on the same ground. Few race tracks anywhere can say their quietest season was the one spent behind barbed wire.