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Vanderbilt'sfootball team used Curry Field from 1892-1922; it was the Commodores first on-campus field and was replaced by Dudley Field II (now FirstBank Stadium).

NC State had one game scheduled for this field which was canceled after the team's student manager left town with the only copy of the schedule following a campus-wide protest over senior privileges.

  * Non-conference games

The Gold and Black of Nashville hosted their first football game in 1890, playing their first two seasons at the city's Athletic Park, which served predominantly as a baseball venue. In late winter 1892, work on the new athletic grounds (at first called just Athletic Field, though the name was not widely used), grading a maple-bordered spot on the east end of campus at a cost of $2,000 (just under $71,000 in 2025). The multi-use track, football, and baseball field was ready by the following April. A couple thousand bleacher seats were placed around the field [1].

Because it had no permanent seating, however, arguments arose as to whether it was suitable to handle the burgeoning Commodores' athletic program, with discussion arising as early as November 1893. Nonetheless, it remained without long-term seating due to the debt of the college athletic association. "Several hundred" temporary seats were added if and when needed, with the most notable such instance coming in 1897, when about 2,000 seats were borrowed from nearby Centennial Grounds. For the most part, however, the facility's transitory stands ebbed up and down every couple years, but ultimately [2].

The only lasting change to the field in this early period was its name: In June 1899, the field was formally christened Dudley Field in honor of long-time athletic supporter Dr. William Lofland Dudley. It wasn't until 1907 that the university took major strides towards improving their athletics, purchasing the grounds of what eventually became FirstBank Stadium. Despite tentative plans to relocate the school gridiron, football action remained on-campus, with a 3,000-person "standing platform" being erected on the south side of the field, plus 20 box seats, giving the plant room for about 8,000 persons in late October. The following year, the grounds were implemented with a scoreboard, as well as rudimentary string lighting, which was utilized for night practice; it was not sufficient for night games. A new press box was added in 1910 [3].

Major improvements came in 1912, when the west side of the venue was equipped with 1,200 "strongly built" seats, painted gray. At the same time, the standing platform was demolished and reconfigured to serve as seating on the east side of the field, and the box seats were reconfigured. Before the revamped eastern stands were completed, capacity was about 9,000 persons, including the old "circus bleachers" in the north and south endzones. Once they were finished (in late October), permanent capacity became 11,000. In 1914, the northern endzone was outfitted with permanent seating, pushing capacity to 12,000 persons [4].

Following this renovation were what one observer called "The seven lean years" of Vanderbilt football, and the end of this era was ushered not with an improvement to Dudley Field, but the construction of a new stadium. The replacement venue, opened with the assistance of local businesses on the plot of land purchased over a decade ago, with 1921 marking the final year of football at the old Dudley Field. In late September 1922, the name of the Commodores' first home field was changed from Dudley Field to Curry Field (named for Irby "Rabbit" Curry, who quarterbacked Vanderbilt's 1914-1916 teams -- including their legendary "point-a-minute" 1915 squad -- and was killed in action after leaving school early to enlist in World War I) after the new stadium donned the name of its predecessor [5].

Though football left, other sports remained, most notably baseball, who stayed at Curry Field through the 1926 season, as well as track and field athletics, who remained through 1929. For the next several decades, the barren grounds were used primarily for scrimmages, freshman games, and intramural sports. The old grounds were cut in half in 1961 when construction began on the Law School Building. For my purposes, that marked the end of the field's useful life, though the northern half of the venue remains as an on-campus green space under the old Curry Field name. That space held college commencement exercises a handful of times, but no athletics of note that I've been able to find [6] [7].

Pictures of Curry Field