The HT Rams at Downs Field. Image: City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department
After nearly 100 years of baseball at the site and more than 17 years since nearby residents of Rosewood began advocating for its preservation, a decade-long process of renovation at East Austin’s historic Downs Mabson Field celebrates its latest milestone this week. The City of Austin’s Parks and Recreation Department will host a ribbon cutting at the ballpark at 2816 East 12th Street on Friday, June 10 at 11:30 a.m., marking the restoration of the field’s grandstands, which have received several historically-compliant upgrades including a new roof and structural renovations.
The site was first used in the 1920s by Samuel Huston College baseball and the Austin Black Senators, the first Negro Baseball League baseball team in Austin. Baseball greats associated with the field include Satchel Paige, Willie Mays, Smokey Joe Williams, and Buck O’Neil. Later, the site hosted the original L.C. Anderson’s Yellowjackets football team, which won the state championship here in 1942. In 1954, Downs Field was established at the site and named in honor of Reverend Karl Downs (1912-1948), who was President of Samuel Huston College. Today, Downs Field is the home field of the Huston-Tillotson Rams.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places and designated as a state landmark in 2015, this grandstand restoration project is made possible by Austin’s Historic Preservation Fund, one of the benefits funded by the city’s Hotel Occupancy Tax.
This work represents the second phase of recent preservation efforts at the park, which currently serves as the home field of the Huston-Tillotson University Rams team — earlier renovations in 2017 included new fences and murals of baseball greats like Satchel Paige and Willie Wells, who played here during the park’s past as the home of the city’s first Negro Leagues professional team, the Austin Black Senators.
Like the nearby Givens Park and its pool further east on 12th Street, Downs Field represents an important landmark for the history of parks and recreation during the segregated past of East Austin, one of the city’s many unsung sites now receiving long-overdue stewardship from local historic preservation advocates.
These recent upgrades at the ballpark — involving a number of area nonprofit partners including the Friends of Downs Field, the Rosewood Neighborhood Association, Six Square, Forklift Danceworks, and the Austin Parks Foundation, among many other interested groups — should ensure this legendary ballpark remains a centerpiece of Black history in Austin for future generations of players and fans.
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