10/23/2026
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If you ever played a Friday night game in Jacksonville, or marched at halftime, or walked across that field in a cap and gown, you did it inside a bowl the town shaped out of its own hillside and walled with rock off its own farms.
The Works Progress Administration built it in 1940 for Jacksonville ISD, and the first game was played that September. Crews cut into a hill in the middle of downtown and shaped the grassy embankment by hand into a recessed bowl, which is why Jacksonville has a bowl and not a grandstand. The field house went up on the foundations of a school that had just come down, facing west, closing the view up East Commerce Street with a broad flight of stairs.
Then there is the rock. The walls and the field house are faced in random sized red iron ore rocks collected off the farms around town, brought to the site load by load by the people who lived there. Locally they have always called that stone giraffe rock. The field house is a two storey block with a triple arched entrance and a pyramidal roof and a low wing on either side, and the name over all of it comes from what Jacksonville was in those years, the Tomato Capital of the World.
Fred Douglass High School, the town's Black high school, played its games in that same bowl. The school closed in 1970 with integration.
The stands got dangerous eventually, and the restrooms and the lights and the staircases with them. Jacksonville passed a bond in 2017 at about eighty per cent and rebuilt the whole thing from the inside out, keeping the rock. It reopened in May 2019, and the first event held in it was the graduation of that year's senior class. So the walls that the people of Cherokee County hauled in off their own fields, one load at a time, are still the walls holding up Friday night, which is about the best thing anybody can say about a building.
