Channell-Lee Stadium

Historic Stadium built around 1950 which has held countless events throughout the years. Many memories have been made here and many more to come.

• Field

By John Burgess:

I thought readers might like a little history of the stadium going back even further.
In 1954 I was a 15 year old boy and played football in the stadium.
Prior to that, in 1952, the football field was the one next to the cemetery. Charles Nelson's team was the first to play in the new stadium. I am reasonably certain that was 1953.
When the stadium was being built in 1950 or there abouts ( I don't have exact dates ) my father was elected to grow and protect the grass on the field in the stadium. This was prior to any games being played. I recall in late afternoon my father and I would go to the stadium and he would turn on the sprinkler systems that would run all night. In the morning he would stop by the stadium and turn them off. By the time the first game was played there the field had a good stand of lush grass.
But perhaps more interesting was the history of the area prior to the building of the stadium. I am going to guess that this was sometime in the late 1940s and around 1950.
Where the stadium sits today there was a wooded depression that sunk back down close to where the middle of the stadium is today.
There was a little two rut road that took off from Spurlin Street and went west perhaps one to two hundred yards.
As I recall it was wet and not very inviting and it ended up at an old dump where a man lived and looked after things.
It was most uninviting and there was trash and dump material everywhere. To go there today and remember how it once was makes it seem as if were impossible.
Another point of interest was a spring of water that came out of the ground near the old man's little shack. The flow of water was sizable and was continuous. It traveled in a north west direction coming out in the branch head in back of the old Charlie Williams home.
I recall my father commenting that this spring and deep depression , originally located about where the west goal post is, was one of the major problems facing the builders of the stadium.
I can only guess at how they handled this problem and ended up putting a sizable amount of fill dirt in the area.
When I built the present news office around 1970 I encountered a similar problem. James Cecil Hoomes, the builder, handled the problem by digging a sizable trench along the stream bed and filling it with rocks which he then recovered with much soil. It worked, and the stream continued to flow beneath the soil along this rock bed.
My knowledge of the stadium is well substantiated due to the fact that my parents built a home around 1950 (one of the first) in Forest Park which was located North of the stadium some
1/4 of a mile, and I would often pedal my bicycle past the site where the stadium was to be built.