Kokernot Field: A Ranch Fortune's Gift to Baseball
Near Alpine, Texas
In the summer of nineteen forty-seven, a west Texas ranching patriarch named Herbert Lee Kokernot Junior hired a professional architect, imported materials from across the state, and built one of the finest small-town baseball stadiums in the American West. He did it for love of the game and for the pleasure of his community. The Kokernot family had been operating cattle ranches in Brewster and Jeff Davis counties since the eighteen eighties, accumulating land until their holdings stretched across roughly three hundred thousand acres under the Double Oh Six brand.
Herbert Kokernot Junior poured some of that ranching wealth into an extraordinary gift: a full-scale, professional-quality ballpark in Alpine with a distinctive stone grandstand, seating about fourteen hundred people, with an outfield that looks out toward the Davis Mountains. Kokernot Field became the home of the Alpine Cowboys, a semiprofessional summer baseball team that played there for decades, drawing players from college programs and fans from across the region. The stadium has been called one of the most beautiful small ballparks in the country.
It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains in use for games and community events today. It stands as a monument to the eccentric generosity of a ranching fortune, and a reminder that the ranchers who built the west Texas cattle economy sometimes invested their gains in things as impractical and wonderful as a baseball field in the middle of the desert.
