Updates From the Centre County Historical Society

Please join us at the Centre Furnace Mansion on Sunday, July 10 at 3:00 p.m. for a special presentation on Memorial Field by Ronald A. Smith, Penn State University Professor Emeritus.

When State College was incorporated in 1896, it had one elementary school, built by College Township, and a high school would not even be created until the next decade. There were no interscholastic athletics and no athletic field, except on the Penn State campus. There was, however, a sinkhole on a farm on the outskirts of State College that, when purchased in 1914, became a playground for a new school on Nittany Avenue.

The sinkhole was not prime agricultural land and was used by some in State College to deposit their garbage. When purchased, the objective was not to use it as an athletic field, but rather as a school play area. But it wasn't long before it became a place for the baseball team to play its games and a practice field for football, as the State College boys already played their games on the Penn State campus.

By the mid-1920s, the Chamber of Commerce saw the "Hollow" as a future athletic stadium, and soon John Bracken, head of Penn State's Landscape Architecture Department, had drawings of an expanded State College school campus, including a stadium.

Little progress was made on the "Hollow" until the Great Depression in the 1930s. At the height of the Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president and the New Deal attempted to come to the rescue by building government projects and putting millions to work on those projects. The most prominent program was the Works Progress Administration, created in 1935. The largest government project in the world's history made possible the building of a stadium in State College, following the leadership of the head of the State College schools, Jo Hays. The nearly $100,000 project, paid principally from WPA funds, created the limestone-adorned athletic field that was eventually called Memorial Field.

This is the illustrated story of a sinkhole in the "Hollow" that was developed first into a baseball field, and then soon became the target of the State College Borough for an engineering project to drain surface water from Allen Street and elsewhere. How the School Board negotiated the draining of State College run-off water into the sinkhole with the State College Borough will be part of the discussion.

With CCHS and Penn State Archives photos from the 1800s through the construction of the stadium, along with material gleaned from newspapers, School Board and Borough minutes, a story will be told about the creation of State College's iconic "Sinkhole" Memorial Field.