Rickwood Field

CTL-E-6119 · Venue · other · 1910–present

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07335 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6119.

Rickwood Field is a baseball park at 1137 2nd Avenue West in Birmingham, Alabama, built for the Birmingham Barons in 1910 by industrialist and team owner Rick Woodward and opened August 18, 1910. The National Park Service National Register nomination, prepared in 1992, calls it the oldest surviving baseball park in the country and records that Woodward spent $75,000 on a park modeled after Pittsburgh's Forbes Field. The nomination stresses its ethnic-heritage significance as the playing field of the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro leagues, a source of pride to Black Birmingham, and names Satchel Paige and Willie Mays among the Black Barons greats produced there. The Barons moved their home games to Hoover after the 1988 season, and the park has since been preserved as a working museum, with the Barons playing one regular-season game a year there. In 2024 it hosted a Major League regular-season game between the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants, a tribute to the Negro Leagues, after renovations. Mays, who began his professional career with the Black Barons in 1948, died two days before that game, a fact announced to the crowd at Rickwood that week.

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 4 — 747 Program, Wave 11; fourth Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): no Rickwood Field entity in the live graph at 3,763 entities (exact / normalized / alias match + token containment; CLEAR). ID CTL-E-6119 free. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 4 — Scan Tail Wave 3 packet ordered reserve, position 34 of 35 (corpus-gap-candidates-2026-10-15.json ranked clean survivor #2026). The scan supplied the NAME STRING ONLY; no fact in this record is sourced to it (CTL-GOV-004). SCOPE GATE: PASS — Out-of-Chicago Negro leagues place admitted under BCI-001/PLACE-001 as national Black baseball infrastructure; not a Chicago record. Vital status: Operating status: extant and in use — preserved as a working museum, hosting amateur, school and annual Barons games and, on June 20, 2024, an MLB regular-season game (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-10-16); NPS nomination already noted 'the playing field is still in use' (1992). STATISTICS — STATISTICS (sourced, dated): Address 1137 2nd Avenue West, Birmingham, AL 35204 and 12.7 acres (NPS nomination, 1992, accessed 2026-10-16). Construction cost $75,000 (NPS). NPS grandstand count 9,312 seats in its 1992 description. CONFLICT SHOWN, NOT BLENDED: capacity figures differ by source and date — NPS (1992) 9,312 seats; Wikipedia (accessed 2026-10-16) 8,300, with 10,800 before renovations. Black Barons tenure also differs in framing — NPS: playing field since their formation in the 1920s–30s until the abolition of the Negro League; Wikipedia tenant list is fragmented across leagues 1920–1960. MEDIA: photo HELD (Entrance to Rickwood Field in 2010 photograph illustrated on Bhamwiki/Wikipedia — for a later PHOTO-001 pass to verify creator, rights and credit; no license claimed. — named candidate only; file-level rights verification per CTL-PHOTO-001 still required; no license claimed); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-6119-rickwood-field.svg); video HELD (no matching-entity CTL Short or verified-rights archival video staged); audio HELD (no rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged); map HELD (address specification in the media block). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = HELD (Birmingham, Alabama — 1137 2nd Avenue West (address per the National Park Service / National Register record; ) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created chart (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced statistics and timeline fact) | video = HELD (No matching-entity CTL Short or verified-rights archival video staged.) | audio = HELD (No rights-cleared matching-entity audio staged.)

Sources

• National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, "Rickwood Field" (form prepared Aug. 19, 1992; accessed 2026-10-16) — address 1137 2nd Avenue West, Birmingham, AL 35204; built/dedicated August 1910; oldest surviving baseball park in the country; $75,000 cost, modeled on Forbes Field; home of Barons and Black Barons; Black Barons pennants 1943 and 1948; Paige and Mays among its greats; period of significance 1910–1942 — https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/5afae99f-2526-4b68-b2cc-182d49c91df5 (primary source · build store)
• Wikipedia, "Rickwood Field" (accessed 2026-10-16) — opened August 18, 1910; oldest existing professional baseball stadium in the country (as attributed there); National Register listing Feb. 1, 1993; Barons move after 1988, one game a year at Rickwood; Cardinals–Giants MLB game June 20, 2024, Cardinals won 6–5; Mays began pro career with Black Barons in 1948 and his passing was announced at Rickwood June 18, 2024 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickwood_Field (build store)

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Record CTL-E-6119 · Combined Graph record U-07335 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 2 sources.
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