Yellow Jacket Stadium
Cleburne, Johnson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1939, work began to replace Rhome Field, where Cleburne High played home football games for twenty years. The Works Projects Administration (WPA) provided most of the funding for the new $80,000 stadium built from concrete and rough cut Somervell County limestone. It opened in fall 1941, with ivy-covered stands, pilasters, seating for 3800, ticket windows, and dressing rooms. The stadium has hosted football games, other sports, and community events. The 1959 state co-championship team, coached by Brooks Conover, played on this field. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2010
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
By 1939, Cleburne High's two-decade-old Rhome Field had outlived its usefulness, and the Works Projects Administration stepped in to fund most of an $80,000 replacement. Built of concrete and rough-cut Somervell County limestone, Yellow Jacket Stadium opened in the fall of 1941 with ivy-covered stands, seating for 3,800, ticket windows, and dressing rooms. It has hosted football, other sports, and community gatherings ever since, including the 1959 state co-championship team coached by Brooks Conover.
Why it matters
The stadium is a lasting piece of New Deal public works, showing how WPA labor and local stone built civic gathering places that small Texas towns still use today.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To understand Yellow Jacket Stadium, picture a small Texas town in the last years of the Great Depression. By 1939, the country was slowly climbing out of the worst economic collapse in its history, and one of the ways it did so was by putting people to work building things that communities would use for generations — roads, schools, courthouses, and, yes, football stadiums.
Cleburne sits in Johnson County, south of Fort Worth, in the kind of North Texas farming and railroad country where the high school football team was the center of civic life. The old Rhome Field had served the town for two decades, but by the late 1930s it had simply worn out. Replacing it was no small ambition for a town of Cleburne's size in a lean decade.
The answer came from Washington, in the form of the Works Projects Administration. The WPA paid wages to millions of Americans during these years, and its fingerprints are all over the public landscape of Texas — often in the same rough, honest stonework you see here. An $80,000 project was serious money in 1939, and most of it came from that New Deal program.
People & events
The story of this stadium is really the story of local hands and local stone. When work began in 1939, crews built the new grandstands from concrete and rough-cut limestone quarried in neighboring Somervell County — a material that gives the structure its solid, timeless look and ties it firmly to the land around it.
When it opened in the fall of 1941, the stadium was something to be proud of: ivy-covered stands, decorative pilasters, ticket windows, dressing rooms, and seating for 3,800 fans. For a town Cleburne's size, that was a genuine arena, built to last and built to gather people.
And gather them it did. The field's proudest football chapter came in 1959, when the team, coached by Brooks Conover, earned a share of the state championship on this very ground. Generations of players, bands, and Friday-night crowds have passed through since, and the stadium has hosted not just football but other sports and community events — the beating heart of local life just as its builders intended.
Its place in the American story
It's easy to think of the New Deal as a story of great dams and sprawling highways, but its most lasting legacy in thousands of American towns is smaller and closer to home: the sturdy public buildings ordinary people still use every day. This stadium is one of them.
What happened in Cleburne happened all across the country. Federal work programs didn't just hand out relief checks; they left behind tangible, useful places — and they did it by employing local workers and using local materials, so the money and the pride stayed in the community. A limestone grandstand in North Texas is a direct cousin of countless WPA schools, post offices, and parks nationwide.
There's a deeper American idea baked into the concrete here, too: that a town's shared life deserves a real home. The people who built this place in 1941 were betting that Cleburne would still be filling these stands decades later. They were right, and that continuity — the same ground hosting the same rituals across generations — is exactly why it earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
If you visit
Come on a fall Friday if you can, because this is a stadium that still does its job. But even on a quiet afternoon, it rewards a closer look.
Run your eyes — and your hand — over the walls. That rough-cut Somervell County limestone is the real thing, laid up more than eighty years ago, and it weathers beautifully. Look for the pilasters and the older architectural details that mark it as a product of its era rather than a modern prefab structure. If the famous ivy is in season, you'll see why the stands were known for it.
As you stand there, remember that you're looking at Depression-era public works still earning their keep. Cleburne makes an easy stop on a North Texas road trip south of Fort Worth, and this stadium pairs naturally with the county courthouse square and the other historic architecture of the town. It's a chance to see the New Deal not in a museum, but doing exactly what it was built to do.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Brooks Conover
Themes & tags
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