The Bristol Municipal Stadium

The Stone Castle looks medieval on purpose. Its builders drew on Gothic design, giving it arched entries, crenellated walls twenty feet high and corner towers, all in rough rubble limestone from a nearby Works Progress Administration project. It cost about $34,000, shared between the federal government and the city, and it is one of two WPA stadiums in Tennessee still in use; the other is Crump Stadium in Memphis. Emory and Henry College played here too. A renovation finished in 1986 cost $500,000, and the Black Slater and Douglass high schools also used the field.

What the plaque says

The Bristol Municipal Stadium The Bristol Municipal Stadium was built with funds provided by the Works Progress Administration between 1934 and 1937. The stone came from nearby Beaver Creek. A dedication ceremony was held on October 8, 1936, before the Tennessee High and Science Hill High of Johnson City football game. It served as the home field for Tennessee High School and Virginia High School, as well as Slater High School and Douglas High School, Black High schools in Bristol, Tennessee, and Bristol, Virginia, respectively, and King College. The Municipal Stadium, commonly known as Stone Castle, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987 for its unique architecture.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bristol's State Street and the 1927 Sessions — 0.9 mi
  The Tennessee side of the street that is also the state line, where producer Ralph Peer recorded 76 songs in the summer of 1927, with the Birthplace of Country Music Museum a few blocks away in Virginia.
• Rocky Mount Museum — 15 mi
  William Cobb's log house at Piney Flats, where Governor William Blount ran the Southwest Territory from 1790 to 1792, now a living-history museum set in 1791 with a reconstructed cabin for the enslaved.
• Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park — 17 mi
  A shoal on the Watauga River where the Transylvania Company bought about 20 million acres from the Cherokee in March 1775, Dragging Canoe refused, and the Overmountain Men mustered in 1780.
• Warriors' Path State Park — 18 mi
  A state park around Fort Patrick Henry Lake on the Holston at Kingsport, named for the Great Indian Warpath, with an unfinished late-1800s railroad grade, mountain-bike trails and a marina.

More markers nearby

• Evan Shelby — 0.9 mi
• Tennessee Ernie Ford's Birthplace — 1.0 mi
• King College — 3.3 mi
• John Isaac Cox — 7.1 mi