On the eighth anniversary of Armistice Day - November 11, 1926 - Greensboro dedicated a stadium to the dead of the war that everyone still believed had ended all wars. There had only been one World War to memorialize, so the city did not yet need the qualifier that would later be chiseled into its name. The stadium was built mostly for football, shaped like a backwards J wrapped around a running track. Within four years it had a baseball diamond planted in the curve of that J, and the ballpark on the northeast corner of Lindsay Street and Yanceyville Avenue began a second life that has now stretched almost a century.
Walk up to the main entrance and the most memorable feature meets you first: a triple-arched gateway, ornate and improbable in front of a working ballpark. The minor-league club that lived here for decades hung quarter-sphere awnings on each arch in red, white, and blue. The arches also frame a pair of bronze plaques listing Guilford County's dead from 1917 through 1919. Look closely at the right-hand plaque and you can see what historians have noticed: two separate alphabetical lists, divided by a marker that was later roughly chiseled away. The plaque sorted the dead by race, as Jim Crow conventions of the era required - white names above, the names of Black soldiers below, with a label between them naming the division. Someone with a chisel decided that label should not survive. The names of the soldiers did. The original sorting is still legible if you know what you are looking at.
In 1930 the Greensboro Patriots of the old Piedmont League moved in, after decades of intermittent play at nearby Cone Athletic Park. They installed lights and put a roof over the box seats. The diamond was first laid out tight to the J's curve, like a scaled-down Polo Grounds with short foul lines and deep center field. Later the field was rotated and the dimensions normalized - left field 327 feet, center 401, right center oddly close at 337 because of a creek that ran along that side and would not be argued with. The Patriots became the Hornets, then the Bats. North Carolina A&T football played here too, until Aggie Stadium opened in 1981. Grimsley High School (then Greensboro Senior High) played its home football games on this field from 1927 to 1948. Dudley High School used it into the late 1970s. The grass took a hammering and was reseeded or replaced through the long Carolina summers.
When Philadelphia's Shibe Park was demolished in 1976, Greensboro acquired a load of its seats and installed them here - so a Carolina League fan in the 1980s might sit on a bench that had once held a Connie Mack Athletics fan watching Lefty Grove. In 1988 the triple arches made a cameo during the road-trip montage of Bull Durham, and the ballpark became, briefly, a national set piece for minor-league nostalgia. The Grandstand stadium club went up in the left field corner seats. A larger concession stand was tacked on outside the third-base stands. None of it solved the central problem: the park was old, the quarters were cramped, and the minor-league boom of the early 1990s wanted bigger boxes and better sight lines than a 1926 football grandstand could offer.
The minor league club lobbied through the 1990s for a new ballpark. They got one. First Horizon Park, since renamed First National Bank Field, opened downtown in spring 2005. World War Memorial Stadium did not get torn down. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001, it kept hosting baseball at a smaller scale. The N.C. A&T Aggies, the NCAA Division I team in the Coastal Athletic Association, now make their home here, the diamond reactivated for college ball just blocks from the campus that produced the Greensboro Four. The arches still stand, the plaques still bear their names, and on warm spring afternoons the ghosts of Patriots and Hornets share the place with Aggies in blue and gold.
The ballpark sits at 36.0797N, 79.7772W, just northeast of downtown Greensboro near East Lindsay Street and Yanceyville. From the air it reads as a rectangular green opening among urban blocks, with the diamond visible inside the running-track oval that traces the original football geometry. The N.C. A&T campus is a few blocks south, the Piedmont Triad International Airport (KGSO) about seven miles WNW.
Coordinates 36.0797N, 79.7772W; recommended viewing altitude 2,500-5,000 feet AGL to read the field shape. Visual landmarks include the running-track oval surrounding the diamond, the triple-arched entrance facing south, and the adjacent N.C. A&T campus to the south. Nearest airports: Piedmont Triad International (KGSO) ~7 nm WNW; Smith Reynolds (KINT) ~25 nm WSW; Raleigh-Durham (KRDU) ~65 nm east. Best light for visual ID is mid-morning or late afternoon when the J-shape's grandstand throws a useful shadow.