Prichard Mayor Carletta Davis wants to see the city’s long-shuttered Municipal Stadium brought back to life — and she believes a brownfield designation and state assistance could do it.
In a video posted to her mayoral Facebook page, Davis looked back on the city-owned football field, track and bleachers that once anchored weekend life in the city, and said she is working to restore the complex to its former glory.
“I have so many memories of running these steps and conditioning, running down the track, watching football games in our community, particularly the ‘Battle of Prichard,'” she said. “I heard everybody’s cry about bringing the ‘Battle of Prichard’ back to Prichard — as it should be — and I’m working on it.”
A Stadium With History
For decades, Prichard Stadium was the epicenter of high school football in the city. Blount and Vigor — the city’s two public high schools, separated by little more than train tracks and neighborhood lines — shared the facility and built one of Alabama’s most intense rivalries on its field.
During the 1990s, the annual matchup regularly featured state championship contenders and drew enormous crowds. Local historians of the rivalry recount games in that era when 15,000 to 20,000 fans packed a stadium that seats roughly 10,000, with overflow crowds visible from Interstate 65. Blount won Class 5A titles in 1990, 1992, 1996, 1997 and 1998, while Vigor competed for championships almost every season of the decade. The two schools have combined for eight state football championships and dozens of NFL players.
The rivalry traces its roots to 1971, when the teams first met. For years, the Sunday before the game, the congregation at a neighborhood church divided itself — Blount fans on one side, Vigor fans on the other — a small ritual of a week when the whole city chose sides.
How the Stadium Was Lost
The stadium’s decline was slow and then sudden. By the late 2010s, the facility’s maintenance had fallen far behind: a nonfunctioning scoreboard, a dead public address system, a leaning goal post, outdated and inadequate locker rooms and restrooms, and trash-strewn, unsanitary facilities.
In September 2020, Vigor High School Principal Gerald Cunningham sent a scathing letter to city leaders withdrawing the Wolverines from the stadium. “The inadequate conditions of this stadium and the environment is extremely embarrassing,” he wrote. “Every time we host an out-of-town team, I find myself humbly apologizing to the principal or his/her designee because of the subpar condition of the stadium.”
Vigor moved its games to Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, and Blount, which had already been playing on its own campus in Eight Mile since 2005, followed. The annual Battle of Prichard — played at the shared stadium for most of five decades — moved to Ladd-Peebles and has stayed there. The city-owned facility has not hosted high school football since, and it now sits blighted and boarded up, visible to thousands of commuters passing on the interstate.
At the time of the withdrawal, city leaders noted the city received only about $20,000 a year from the school system to maintain the facility — money that went mostly to grass cutting, lights, water and cleanup — far short of what major repairs required.
The Brownfield Path
Davis said assistance from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management could be the key to revival. She contacted ADEM to request a Phase I assessment of whether the site could be designated a brownfield.
“I contacted the state of Alabama, ADEM, to come out and do a Phase 1 Assessment of whether or not this could be deemed a brownfield, and that just simply means that we would be able to get funding to restore this great stadium,” she said. “This has been such a great asset for our community. I really want to see it come back. I know you want to see it come back.”
A Phase I Environmental Site Assessment is the standard first step in the brownfield process: an inspection of a property’s history and current condition to identify potential contamination from past uses. If a site qualifies, it can unlock state and federal funding streams — including EPA brownfield grants — specifically designed to assess and clean up properties whose environmental questions scare away ordinary financing.
For a city like Prichard, which has one of the smaller tax bases in Mobile County, that pathway matters. A brownfield designation does not clean up anything by itself, but it can unlock the assessment grants and cleanup funds that make a restoration project pencil out.
The Bigger Picture
Davis’ push comes as the city works through larger questions about its finances and public services, and any stadium restoration would compete with other priorities for scarce dollars. But the mayor has cast the project as more than athletics — as a matter of civic identity.
Prichard residents expressed support for the proposal in comments posted under her video statement, and the idea has resonated with alumni of both schools who remember the nights when the stadium overflowed.
“This is only the beginning, but every restoration starts with a first step,” Davis has said of the effort. “Prichard Stadium has been an important part of our history, and I believe it can be part of our future, too.”
Whether the Battle of Prichard ever returns to its original home depends on environmental findings, funding and a renovation bill no one has yet sized. But for the first time in years, the city’s leaders are formally asking the question.