The site's history as a public gathering place predates organised racing. The Douglas County Fair was held on the grounds from 1858 onward, establishing the parcel as a venue for agricultural and community events. Horse racing arrived when the Omaha Driving Park Association formed during the late 1870s, with the organisation formally purchasing land bounded by Laird and Boyd Streets and 16th to 20th Streets. In 1880 a group of prominent Omaha businessmen — including John Creighton, James E. Boyd, and William A. Paxton — paid $15,000 to acquire the property and fund improvements, underscoring the venue's significance to the city's civic and social life.
For several years following the 1880 purchase the Nebraska State Fair was held at the Omaha Driving Park, cementing its standing as the state's most important outdoor events site. In 1895 the fair moved permanently to the grounds, and it remained there through 1900, when it relocated to Lincoln.
The venue hosted the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition, a large-scale world's fair held in Omaha to celebrate the development of the American West. That event drew national attention to the city and to the driving park grounds.
The event for which the Omaha Driving Park is most frequently noted in popular history occurred on May 19, 1883, when Buffalo Bill Cody staged the first official performance of his Wild West Show before an audience of 8,000 people. The show, which dramatised frontier life through horseback performances, marksmanship, and theatrical spectacle, would go on to become one of the most influential entertainment productions in American history, touring internationally for decades. Its premiere at the Omaha Driving Park was the founding performance of that entire tradition.
In 1898, a separate local wild west show was presented on the grounds as part of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition programme, revisiting the theme that had been inaugurated fifteen years earlier.
As horse racing declined and the automobile age arrived, the Omaha Driving Park transitioned toward motor racing. The venue was renamed Sunset Driving Park in 1904. Under this name it hosted automobile races at which Barney Oldfield, the most famous American racing driver of the early twentieth century, broke world speed records, as did Alonzo Webb. Automobile racing continued at the facility through 1908.
A board track was subsequently constructed on the property during the 1910s. In 1914 a motorcycle achieved a speed of 101 miles per hour at the venue, representing the facility's highest recorded speed at that stage. Automobile racing resumed after the motorcycles and continued through approximately 1923, marking the final chapter of organised motor racing on the site.
By the early 1920s the racing activity at Sunset Driving Park was winding down, and the property had effectively ceased active use by 1924. A related but separately sited Sunset Speedway operated west of Omaha during this period, though its connection to the original Driving Park was in name and lineage rather than physical continuity. The original Driving Park land was subdivided into approximately one hundred residential lots and sold for housing, making it the last undeveloped parcel within the Kountze Place neighbourhood at the time of its conversion. The 35-acre site that had hosted governors, world's fair visitors, and the pioneers of American motorsport was absorbed entirely into the city's residential fabric.
The Omaha Driving Park occupies a small but legitimate place in American motorsport history as a venue where early automobile racing and land-speed record attempts took place during the sport's foundational era, and its broader history as the site of Buffalo Bill's first Wild West Show links it to the cultural history of the American West at the turn of the twentieth century.