Francis Field

Francis Field is the sports stadium of Washington University in St. Louis, MO. It was originally built as the main venue for the 1904 Olympics (where baseball was not featured), then became the school's main sports stadium, hosting baseball and football games among other sports. It was also the home field of the St. Louis Stars of the North American Soccer League in the 1970s.

When it was built in 1904, it was one of the first buildings to used reinforced concrete as the basis of its grandstand. It was originally called World's Fair Stadium (the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition was a bigger deal than the fledgling Olympics at the time), and then Washington University Stadium. It was renamed in 1907 for former Governor of Missouri David R. Francis, who had presided the Exposition. In 2019, it was renamed Francis Olympic Field in recognition of its having hosted the first Olympic Games to take place outside Europe. It has since been designated as a National Historic Landmark.

Capacity was as much as 19,000 in its heyday, thanks to temporary wooden stands. The stadium is still standing and still in use, but with a reduced capacity of 3,300. In 1919, it was used as a spring training site by the St. Louis Cardinals. With the recent end of World War I which had amputated the 1918 season by a month, teams were looking for all possible ways to save money, and holding spring training close to home was one such ploy.