The stadium exists because of Emory P. Mitchell, who started his Bluefield career in 1907 as a 22-year-old bookkeeper at a dry-goods store on Princeton Avenue and ended it as the city manager who refused to let the Great Depression keep his town from building something permanent. When voters rejected the 1939 levy that would have funded the project, Mitchell and his family signed a personal note to cover the local match for the federal grant. The estimated cost was $174,000, the labor came from the Works Progress Administration, and the stadium opened in 1936 with no one quite sure how it would be paid for. Mitchell died in 1951, and the dedication ceremony naming the venue for him took place on October 23, 1954, more than three years later. His daughter Betty would later write that of all the things her father built, none was closer to his heart.

The annual Beaver-Graham game draws around 12,000 people to a stadium that officially seats 10,000. Bluefield High School and Graham High School are separated by a state line and by a city park, and that's it. They have played each other since 1936. The Beavers lead the all-time series (69-25-2 as of 2025). ESPN's Scholastic Sports America once carried the highlights; the Great American Rivalry Series has televised it in recent years. The schools have settled the awkwardness of two home teams in one stadium by alternating which side gets the home bench each year, a kind of civic detente that only makes sense if you understand that nothing in either town matters more on a Friday night in October.

On November 4, 2019, USA Today's bracket-style poll for America's Best High School Football Stadium came down to a final between Mitchell Stadium and R.R. Jones Stadium in El Paso, Texas. Mitchell won with nearly 60 percent of more than 3.6 million votes cast. Bluefield Mayor Ron Martin attributed the victory, with a straight face, to "hillbilly voodoo." The stadium had previously beaten Paul Brown Tiger Stadium in Massillon, Ohio; the Round Valley Ensphere in Eagar, Arizona; and Tacoma's Stadium Bowl, knocking off venues that football historians take very seriously, with a votes-from-home campaign that the Two Virginias understood perfectly.

Mitchell Stadium has hosted more than just high school football. West Virginia and Virginia Tech played each other here in 1953, and the Hokies came back for a soccer game in 2007. Bluefield University's Rams returned to the field in 2012 after a 71-year absence — the program had folded during World War II following Pearl Harbor — and Bluefield State University's Big Blue brought NCAA Division II football back to the stadium in 2021 after a 40-year hiatus. In 2011 and 2012, country acts including Eric Church, Dierks Bentley, and Jake Owen drew nearly 20,000 people for the Second Chance Rocks the Two Virginias festival, until the June 2012 derecho — the costliest storm in West Virginia history — blew through and evacuated the stands. Owen tweeted an apology and came back a few weeks later with Church to finish the show.

Walk into Mitchell Stadium on an empty afternoon and the WPA stonework still feels like the New Deal made permanent. Field turf laid by the June Shott Foundation in 2007 replaced the grass that Bluefield kids played on for seven decades. There have been efforts over the years to rename the place — for Coach Merrill Gainer, who won four state championships at Bluefield High, and for others — but none have stuck. In June 2025, Graham High School announced it would move its home games to a turfed practice field on its own campus, ending a tenancy as old as the stadium itself. The Beavers will keep playing here. The Rams and the Big Blue will keep playing here. And the line between the two Virginias will keep running through the 50-yard line.