Wallace Wade Stadium (originally Duke Stadium) has been used by Duke since 1929; it replaced Hanes Field.

Overall, NC State had a record of 14-25-1 at this field, playing every game as a conference-mate. NC State has not fared well in ranked games in Durham, going 0-6 when the Blue Devils were ranked, and 2-3 in games where they were ranked.

  * Non-conference games

News of a new stadium for Duke broke in September 1928. Funded by the sale of private bonds, the stadium was expected to hold 35-50,000 persons, with the size depending on the number of bonds sold. The new stadium was expected to be located on Duke's new west campus, affording the venue ample room for construction; the spacious nature of the venue was one of its greatest early selling points. More important than the increased comfort of the stadium was the increased capacity: Hanes Field could hold only 10,000 persons. "[T]he new stadium will fill a need long felt in the limited facilities of the present athletic field," crowed the sports editor of the Durham Morning Herald. "The stadium will be in keeping with the beauty and dignity of the buildings erected on campus" [1].

The new venue was refered to as Duke Stadium or Duke University Stadium, a name which it would retain for nearly 4 decades. Eventually, the new stadium was earmarked to have a $500,000 (just under $9 million in 2023) pricetag. The state-of-the-art venue was built of steel and concrete, to "rival most of the great stadiums of ancient Greece and Rome" to maximize durability. "Ten thousand years from now," a writer for The Stanly News-Herald prophesied, "strange peoples will possibly dig it out of the ground and wonder who furnished the money with which to construct such a marvel of workmanship" [2].

After nearly 9 months of clearcutting and excavation on the natural bowl site (known as Methodist Flat) which was picked for the site, concrete was poured. By this time it had been decided that the venue would hold 35,000 persons, but could be expanded at any time. The completed horseshoe-style stadium was said to be "near perfect," with design by architects who "traveled far and near for several seasons and made a close study of all athletic structures." In particular, the plant's natural site lines were lauded, as well as the fine track surrounding the football field [3].

As soon as the new stadium was announced, the opening game was known to be an October 5th, 1929 date against Pittsburgh, hosting the eastern juggernaut for their first trip to the south. The game was highly anticpated locally -- so eagerly anticipated that NC State moved their season-opening home game against Washington & Lee to Friday so that the Blue Devils could host the state's only major football game that Saturday. Despite the intriguing intersectional matchup, Durham ultimately struggled to fill their new stadium, selling 20,000 tickets and losing 7-52 [4].

Duke held their first sell-out in 1935, blowing the doors off the stadium's capacity with a 46,880-person crowd -- a southern record -- against rival North Carolina. From then on out, the stadium was periodically supplemented with temporary stands, but was not permanently expanded for decades. Instead, the field was enlarged through the addition of thousands of "semitemporary" bleachers. For decades, these wooden additions were considered part of Duke's "official" attendance and ticket alotment, despite the transitory nature of the bleachers, which could come and go even mid-season as needed [5]. As such, tracking down a steady number for Duke's annual capacity is a near-impossibility.

It would be impossible not to tell the story of Duke Stadium without mentioning the relocated 1942 Rose Bowl, for which the stadium was utilized during the Second World War. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was feared the Japanese may try an attack on the west coast; as such, mass gatherings, including football games, were prohibited. Wade petitioned and convinced the bowl to be relocated to Duke for the season, and succeeded with the concession that the stadium be expanded to appropriately accomodate the event surplus seats were borrowed from arch-rivals UNC and NC State, ultimately boosting the plant's capacity to 54,000 [6]. The capacity stabalized around 40,078 until the 1980 season.

Duke had plans of replacing their press box as early as 1947; the original box, which was enlarged and enclosed back in 1936, was seen as old even back then. Other than minor improvements, the box was scarcely updated after 1936; "Improvements of its football press facilities," complained Durham sports editor Elton Casey in 1965, "is one thing Duke officials haven't seen reason to smile on yet." The stadium televised its first game (another edition of the Duke-Carolina game) in 1955 after the box was retrofitted so that video signal could be relayed from the box to a mobile unit located outside the box to the campus clocktower, from which the game was eventually beamed to a national audience [7].

Outdated though it was, the old box soldiered on, largely because of the ballooning price tag of replacing the thing. The scoreboard, on the other hand, fared better. Though the one originally installed in 1929 was state of the art -- it showed which players were in the line-up (numbers posted on the board corresponded to a set printed in the weekly programs), and the penalty exacted, in addition to now-standard stuff such as time and down -- but was replaced with a new one which came with an amplifying system in 1948, which was in turn replaced in 1972 with an electric scoreboard, featuring a messaging system [8].

Much like the press box, Duke Stadium was scarcely updated for several decades; Duke Stadium was formally renamed Wallace Wade Stadium in 1967, during the September 30th game against South Carolina, the Blue Devils' first home game of the season. It was named in honor of Duke's long-time football coach, who helmed the Methodists' football teams from 1931-1941, and again from 1946-1950, accumulating a 110-36-7 record.

That all changed ahead of the 1980 football season. Construction started just after the close of the 1979 football season, with work encompassing the replacement of all the wooden seats with aluminum ones, repairs to the concrete stands, and the construction of a combination press box/fitness center (later called the Finch-Yeager Building), restroom renovations, a new scoreboard, and a re-sodded field. Over the course of work, the upper bleachers on the west side of the stadium were removed, lowering the capacity to 38,525 -- this was where the new press box suite was built. The renovation cost about $4.2 million (over $15.5 million in 2023) in total, with much of the cost focused on the press box [9].

The press box was not finished until the 1981 season. The facility's track was also closed from late 1979 until spring 1981. In 1984, Wade Stadium installed their first permanent lights, having played under temporary lights for the first time in 1983. In 1998, the stadium replaced the scoreboard once again with a 70' x 50' board capable of video replay. In 2015, the Finch-Yeager Building was replaced with a 5-story box replete with suite boxes. A new scoreboard was also installed, the track was removed, and the stadium's playing surface was also lowered. The suite seating increased capacity to 40,004 persons [10]. In 2015, a new renovation was initiated, which started in 2015 with the installation of aa new scoreboard and was completed in 2017, with the construction of Blue Devil Towers [14].

Pictures of Wallace Wade Stadium