Gangsters once used a field off St. Charles Rock Road to practice shooting from moving cars. Not in Chicago. Not in some Warner Bros. fever dream. Here. In St. Louis County, near Pennsylvania Avenue, at a place later remembered as the old Maxwelton Race Track. St. Louis does love a property with range.

The historical match is surprisingly strong. A St. Louis Magazine piece on the old Maxwelton Race Track places it at St. Charles Rock Road and Pennsylvania Avenue and notes that it later became a hangout for “Dinty” Colbeck of Egan’s Rats. The article also says the place was still remembered in the 1940s as a ruined landmark that boys explored, which helps explain how this kind of story lingered in local memory long after the gunfire stopped.

Before the gangsters got there, Maxwelton had already lived several lives. Postcards show the track operating by 1907, though nobody seems to have found a firm opening date or the original owners. Horses ran there: a September 1917 wire report has jockey Eddie Taplin winning a six-furlong handicap at Maxwelton Park. That July, Barney Oldfield drove his “Golden Submarine” around the dirt oval and set records, reportedly covering a mile in 45 seconds flat. The next month he beat Ralph De Palma in three sanctioned events. Later came greyhounds: the Wellston Kennel Club was advertising nightly races in 1927 and was fighting injunctions to keep running in 1932. It was built for speed long before it was used for anything as stupidly practical as rehearsing drive-by gunplay. That matters because it explains why a gang would choose it. A racetrack is already an argument in favor of velocity.

The gang in question was Egan’s Rats, one of early St. Louis’s dominant criminal organizations. They grew out of ward politics, street violence, labor slugging, robbery, and bootlegging, which is a very efficient way to say they kept one foot in City Hall and the other on somebody’s throat. After Tom Egan was killed in 1921, William “Dinty” Colbeck became a leading figure during the gang’s bloody feud with the Hogan Gang. By 1923, public anger over all the shootings had become intense enough that the gang shifted some of its activity outside the city proper.

That is where Maxwelton enters the story in a more specific, more unsettling way. The old Crime Library history of Egan’s Rats says Colbeck moved the gang’s headquarters to St. Louis County, converted an 11-room house into the Maxwelton Club, and took over an abandoned horse and motorcycle racetrack near St. Charles Rock Road and Pennsylvania Avenue. There, according to that account, the Rats raced around the track taking target practice on tin cans and whiskey bottles, terrorizing nearby residents. That is not just colorful gang lore. It is repeated closely enough across sources to sound like memory with tire tracks.

Another retelling, less formal but clearly drawing on the same tradition, adds the sort of details that make the whole thing feel unpleasantly vivid: cans and bottles set in the middle of the track, gunmen firing either from the grandstands or from cars circling at speed, locals stuck listening to target practice from men who were already killing each other in the city. That version also includes a story about gangsters forcing a farmer and his family from their car and dumping it in a ditch, after which Colbeck allegedly paid them enough to buy replacements. That anecdote is harder to independently verify, so take it as local gangster lore rather than courtroom testimony. The shooting-practice part, though, repeats consistently.

The location today is a cemetery, which St. Louis Magazine says flatly. A local history page by Wellston-area locals is more specific: the track sat on the southwest corner of Rock Road and Pennsylvania Avenue, across from Zion Cemetery (7401 St. Charles Rock Road), and the land is now the western addition to Laurel Hills Cemetery. The map pin on this story sits at Zion’s address, so treat it as the right intersection, not the exact lot. Either way, the gangsters’ practice field became a cemetery. Which, frankly, is a very St. Louis punch line.

The same page carries the memories of boys who grew up in Wellston in the 1940s. They rode bikes two miles out the Rock Road, past the big cemeteries and the looming St. Vincent’s asylum, to explore what was left: an abandoned concrete grandstand in deep weeds, with no trace of a track. They had heard in hushed whispers that the Egan gang had used it for target practice with pistols, shotguns and machine guns, and they looked for bullet holes in the concrete. One of them never found any. Another remembers his mother, who rode horses to Wellston as a girl, galloping past the spot so the gang wouldn’t see her. Photos from January 1953 show heavy equipment clearing the grandstand site, and the page says the grandstand was razed in 1958. (Those two dates don’t quite agree, so take the demolition year as approximate.)

There is also a broader geographical irony here that the city seems to produce without trying. St. Charles Rock Road is one of the oldest roads in the county, originally part of the route between St. Louis and St. Charles, a road layered with stagecoach history, expansion, industry, traffic, and all the ordinary movement of a region. Somewhere along that old corridor, one abandoned recreational site became a gangster outpost. First the horses. Then the race cars. Then the boys with guns. Eventually the dead. That is not urban planning so much as Missouri gothic by attrition.

What makes this story linger is not just that it happened. It is that the place itself survived in local memory long after the track disappeared. Not as a museum piece. Not as a polished civic anecdote. Just as a patch of ground with a bad reputation and a strange past. A lot of St. Louis history survives that way. Not in monuments. Not in plaques. Just in the human habit of attaching dread to geography and passing it down like directions.

So yes, as best as the record allows, there really was a place off Rock Road where St. Louis gangsters practiced driving and shooting. It was tied to the old Maxwelton Race Track and Maxwelton Club, used by Dinty Colbeck and Egan’s Rats during the early 1920s gang war. The cars are gone. The grandstands are gone. The racetrack is gone. The field is gone. The story, annoyingly enough, turned out to be the part that stayed.