If it's any consolation, "Camptown Races" was pretty much thought to have been inspired by actual races in Camptown PA (northern Pennsylvania), a site not too terribly far from Athens PA where Foster attended the Athens Academy as a pubescent sprout and was miserably unhappy by most accounts. We drove through/around Camptown this past summer and discovered that it had some wonderfully flat expanses where races might indeed have been held nicely in that hilly country.