EDITORIAL: Carthage leaders did their best to find a way to save historic stadium
Mar. 28—We applaud Carthage city leaders for being diligent in their efforts to save their historic Carl Lewton Stadium.
Unfortunately, all of those efforts pointed in one direction — it must come down.
The stadium was a Depression-era Works Progress Administration project in the late 1930s and was home field for two minor league baseball teams in the KOM (Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri) League in the 1940s and 1950s.
It was originally built as an amphitheater and converted to a baseball stadium soon after that. It is named for Carl Lewton, a former baseball coach and umpire and teacher and administrator in the Carthage School District.
The city closed the stadium in January after an engineer found electrical problems and structural cracking sufficient to deem the structure unsafe for use.
The Public Services Committee had told Abi Almandinger, parks director, and the city staff to seek bids to tear the stadium down but to see if the contractor could shore up and save the stadium's fieldstone facade that gave it its nickname — "The Rock" — but Almandinger said the four contractors who replied to the city request for bids all said saving the facade wasn't feasible because of the way the stadium was built.
The concrete stands and the rock wall are supporting each other, so when one is removed, the other will fall.
"We talked about boring holes in it and filling it with concrete to create the safety structure we needed," Almandinger said. "We talked about shoring up the wall. We talked about bracing it. We talked about replacing the steel. We talked about replacing the concrete. We evaluated all of those things. We got four bids, we talked to the city engineer, we talked to an architect who is an expert in his field, and every single one of them have said it's not possible to keep the wall upright."
The city plans to preserve the baseball field and the stone backstop behind home plate and work to make the baseball field usable for the Carthage Tigers baseball team at least until the school district determines whether it can build a baseball stadium on the Carthage High School campus.
Voters going to the polls April 4 will decide a $26 million school bond issue that is intended to build a performing arts center and a baseball field at the high school.
In the meantime, you can watch the Carthage Tigers play their home games at Joe Becker Stadium in Joplin this spring.
No one wants to see a celebrated piece of local history come down, but Carthage officials have done their best to find a way to save it.
Sometimes, the game just doesn't go your way, despite your best efforts.
