Oak Ridge's Playing Fields have been used by the school for at least a century, if not more. Though they are now supplemented by the parade field (west of campus), several sports continue to call the area home.

Overall, NC State had a record of 2-0 at this field, though one game was ruled out due to the regulations of the North Carolina Athletics Association and ordered to be replayed.

  * Non-conference games

The Oak Ridge Institute is among the oldest schools in North Carolina, tracing its roots back April 1850, when a number of northwestern Guilford citizens raised money to found a preparatory school. Principal among the early founders were Jesse Benbow, J. Allen Lowery (whose property to this day makes up the bulk of the campus's grounds), James B. Clark, Wyatt F. Bowman, and John J. Saunders. A single-story building measuring 24' x 50' located on a 2-acre tract composed the entirety of the Oak Ridge Institute's campus when it first opened its doors in 1853 for one short Spring term starting in March; it reorganized and opened with a more standardized course the following Fall.

The institute continued to grow steadily throughout the 1850s until the Civil War. Legend holds that every able-bodied male student enlisted for the Confederacy, and the closure from 1862-1866 remains the only period of inactivity in the school's history. It could well have been shuttered longer: just two days before reopening in 1866, the sole school building burnt down. Undaunted, the school forged on, holding classes temporarily in a log cabin nearby while the building was replaced.

The Institute went through a period of relative decline until 1875, when former student J. Allen Holt took charge of the school. Under his tutelage and that of his brother, Martin H. Holt (who joined in 1879), the school flourished, blossoming from about 40 pupils to over 250, necessitating expansion. The original building was expanded in 1878, and the campus enlarged in 1884 when a two-story brick building (a chapel on the upper level, with several educational rooms on the lower) was built, and again in 1891 Holt Hall (a gymnasium, library, and educational building) was erected. At this period, the school was also made coeducational -- one of just a handful of such schools in the state [1] [2].

I bring up the Holt brothers primarily to emphasize that they were widely trusted by the Oak Ridge Institute. The institute convinced the Holts to stay and teach by promising to deed them the school grounds; in turn, the Holts began amassing large quantities of land surrounding the school over the course of their tenure, including at least ten adjacent properties from 1889-1905. Concurrent with these purchases was an 1891 report stating that "Several acres have been added to the campus, and this will be laid out in drives, walks and athletic grounds." Most pertinent to my research are the several deeds from 1914-1915 in which the Holts deeded back to the Institute several of the properties they purchased, among them one entitled the "Playground and School Tract."

The land several acres referred to in 1891 was likely that of J. Allen Lowery, who sold them 63 acres (DB 99 p. 415) of land adjoining the existing campus. All of the land from Holt's 1914 playground tract was included in this lot, and when overlaid with the earliest aerial maps available, the tract covers the southern half of the current athletic field. It's worth noting that, however, that though the "playground" tract did not cover the entire modern athletic field, all of the land encompassing the modern softball and baseball fields was purchased in the same 1891 conveyance. Though Oak Ridge was known to have had athletics as early as 1883, it's unclear where they played or practiced. The earliest reference to a home athletic event I've located is in the Fall of 1898 [3].

This same field has been used as an athletic ground ever since. The football field was located in the far southeastern corner of the grounds, directly abutting the Danville-Salisbury Road (now NC 150) and running north-to-south, perpendicular to the road, while the baseball diamond can be seen with home plate facing almost due southeast in aerial images from 1938 through 1970. That January, the baseball grounds were shifted slightly: home plate moved east, the field was rotated to face north and slightly west, and an electronic scoreboard was added; the distance from the road to home plate (about 300') remained roughly the same. Later, in 2000, the baseball field was enclosed and renamed in honor of long-time coach Tee Frye; it is now known as Frye Field [4].

Though it is now North Carolina's only military academy, Oak Ridge did not start out that way; it was pressed into service in 1917, and became an official Junior ROTC school in 1926. Similarly, though Oak Ridge began as one of the preeminent athletic programs in the state, as the United States entered the Great Depression, its heydays were beginning to wane [1]. In 1936, the Oak Ridge Military Institute disbanded interscholastic football competition, focusing instead on basketball, baseball, tennis, and swimming, in addition to intramural sports [5]. With no football, the southern half of the field went unused for many years after the baseball diamond's 1970 shift, though it was a football practice field when a team was intermittently fielded (see below). Evidence of a rudimentary softball diamond (in the form of a backstop) appeared about 1995, with the field showing signs of some upkeep in photos afterwards. In 2022, an outfield fence was added at the behest of school president Steve Wilson [4].

The Cadets would not field another football team until 1968. Once they did resume the gridiron game, the school built a new football field in a different spot west of their main campus which Jim Savage (c.o. 1962, director of the academy's museum and archives) recalled as "swampy" and largely disused during his time at the school in the early 1960s [6] [7]. Improved as part of the school's new "Forward March" initiative to expand attendance, the field was built just east of the intersection of NC 150 and NC 68; the grounds were also recalled to have been Professor Holt's wheat fields. The field was supplied with set of steel bleacher seats discarded from East Carolina's Ficklen Stadium improvement [1] [7].

Despite the administrative investment, declining enrollment forced the team's suspension once again in 1974. The program was briefly revived from 1995-1999, but closed after finishing the season with just 15 rostered players before the turn of the century. After playing 8-man football from 2007-2008 thanks in part to a donation from alum Dale Earnhardt Jr., the program was resuscitated for what remains the final time in 2010, this time to try and help the school's flagging attendance. In so doing, they managed to recruit a number of Division I-offered players to transfer to the school for a single season and play a hastily-constructed schedule of teams -- teams which remained in a volatile state of flux over the course of the year as tales of their eventual undefeated 8-0 season spread.

The immediate success was not because of the virtues of a military-based education, but because several of the players were described as "post-graduate" students who were deemed ineligible for high school play by both of the bodies regulating North Carolina's high school athletics -- neither of which Oak Ridge was a member of. The decision to include such players was immediately reversed the following season, leading to the departure of head coach Otis Yelverton, the controversial firebrand who helped put their name back on the map.

Hedge fund manager and enrollment expansion-brainchild Stan Kowalewski packed his bags, too, after the Securities and Exchange Commission insinuated that he may have to return his major fiduciary donations to the school for misleading investors. With both the progenitors of the shool's nascent sports boom packing their bags, Oak Ridge mothballed their football program for the last time ahead of the 2011 season. The former football and track grounds remain the school's primary parade ground, as well as their soccer field [8].

* Actual deed books show the transfer of only 3/4-ac. deeded by the school to the Holts in December 1884 (DB 85 p. 600) over a dozen years after they arrived. The school's original lot wasn't deeded to the Holts until December 1892 (DB 99 p. 415).

Pictures of Playing Fields