NFL History | Milwaukee County Stadium Site — A Second Home City With Its Own Ticket Book

On 18 December 1994 the Green Bay Packers beat the Atlanta Falcons 21-17 at Milwaukee County Stadium, and Pro-Football-Reference records no later league game at the ground. Pro-Football-Reference's box score gives the attendance as 54,885 and prints the quarters as Atlanta 3, 6, 0, 8 and Green Bay 14, 0, 0, 7. Brett Favre threw first-quarter touchdown passes to Sterling Sharpe and Anthony Morgan, and in the fourth quarter ran nine yards for the winning score. The same site's stadium page credits him with 321 passing yards that afternoon.

The figure that carries this entry is on that stadium page rather than in the box score. Pro-Football-Reference lists 126 National Football League games at Milwaukee County Stadium between 1953 and 1994, all of them Green Bay's, with a regular-season record there of 75-47-3 and a postseason record of 1-0. The first was on 27 September 1953, a 27-0 defeat by the Cleveland Browns in which Otto Graham passed for 292 yards. That shutout and Favre's nine-yard run are the two ends of the span Pro-Football-Reference gives as 1953 to 1994. The game count and the span are printed here as the source prints them and are deliberately not divided into a per-season average, because no source consulted states how many Milwaukee dates any particular season carried.

## A second home, not an overflow

Most tenancy arguments in this series describe a club that had nowhere of its own and rented a civic building. Milwaukee inverts that shape. Green Bay's supporters had voted for a stadium of their own: the club's history pages record a referendum on 3 April 1956 and a dedication on 29 September 1957, at a ground renamed Lambeau Field in 1965. From 1957 the club had a purpose-built municipal home in its own city, and went on renting a second municipal building in a larger one until 1994 anyway.

The landlord was not a football body. The Society for American Baseball Research's park history, written by Gregg Hoffmann and published on 5 April 2013, records that County Stadium was owned by Milwaukee County and the City of Milwaukee and paid for with a combination of city and county bonds against an initial estimate of five million dollars. It also records the ground under it: in 1949 Congress approved the lease of twenty-two acres of federal land at one dollar a year, and the county bought a further ninety-eight acres. Hoffmann gives the opening as 14 April 1953, with 34,357 present for the first regular-season baseball game.

So the arrangement had three layers. A football club from one city rented a ballpark from a county in another, and the county held part of the site from the federal government at a peppercorn rent. The federal interest recorded by Hoffmann is not traced further here, and no document of that lease was read for this entry.

Milwaukee Record, in an article by Tyler Maas published on 6 January 2022, sets the Milwaukee habit earlier than the ballpark. It names Borchert Field in 1933, the State Fair Park ground from 1934 to 1951, and Marquette Stadium in 1952 before County Stadium took the fixtures from 1953. Maas records that the club sold separate Green and Gold ticket books, which is the detail that makes the point: Milwaukee was not spillover seating for people who could not get into Green Bay. It had its own subscribers.

## What is not here

The club's own account of its grounds does not include it. Read in September 2026, the stadiums named in the Packers' history section are Hagemeister Park, City Stadium and Lambeau Field. Milwaukee is not among them. That is a statement about the pages consulted on that date and not a claim about what the club holds; the omission is recorded because 126 league games is a large thing to be missing from a list of four decades of home grounds.

No football capacity for County Stadium was sourced this run. Hoffmann writes that piecemeal expansion eventually took the ballpark past fifty-five thousand, but that is a baseball figure and it is not converted here into a football one. The consequence is worth stating plainly: the post-merger requirement about home-stadium size, which other entries in this series argue against other grounds, cannot be tested against this building on the evidence gathered, and no finding either way is claimed. The 54,885 in the box score is an attendance, not a capacity, and the two are printed side by side without a ratio between them.

No source reached this run explains why the arrangement ended after 1994. Maas records that it ended; the reason is not stated here because it was not sourced, and it is not guessed.

Hoffmann gives the ballpark's last baseball game as 28 September 2000 and the completion of demolition as 21 February 2001, and records that the infield became a youth ground under the name Helfaer Park. Popular accounts that date the demolition to 2000 are not followed here; Hoffmann's date is the one this entry carries, and it is his.

## Status, September 2026

This entry describes the building, the arrangement and the game as its sources record them: Pro-Football-Reference's box score and stadium page, a SABR park history last published in 2013, a Milwaukee Record article of January 2022, and the club's own history pages as read in September 2026. Nothing in it establishes what stands on the county grounds today beyond the youth ground Hoffmann names and the baseball park in the cover photograph, and nothing in it should be read as describing the current use of the site.

## Coordinate

One method, disclosed. The United States Census Bureau's geocoder was asked four times for the stadium's own address, as 201 South 46th Street under two postal codes, once through the structured endpoint, and once for the current ballpark's Brewers Way address. All four returned an empty match set. A control query on West National Avenue, the road along the southern edge, answered immediately at 43.020402 / -87.971457, which shows the geocoder healthy and the federal address file simply silent about this district. That control also came back under a postal code, 53295, matching neither of the two this entry had tried for the stadium address, and no attempt is made here to explain why. The Historical Marker Database returned nothing for County Stadium under that name or for Helfaer, and Milwaukee publishes no address-point service this project could reach.

The pin is therefore taken from the only positional record found on the ground itself: the field GPS on the Historical Marker Database's entry for the Henry Aaron marker, marker 36188, erected by the Milwaukee Brewers in 2001 and standing on Brewers Way about a tenth of a mile south of the interstate, at 43 degrees 1.755 minutes north by 87 degrees 58.339 minutes west. That marker is about a baseball player and not about the football ground; it is used here only as a surveyed point on the county grounds. The precision radius of 400 metres is sized from the footprint of a vanished stadium bowl standing somewhere on those grounds, not from the decimal places of the reading.

## Cover

The cover photograph does not show County Stadium and no photograph of the 18 December 1994 game was found under a licence this project can use. It shows Miller Park, photographed by Carol M. Highsmith on 28 August 2016 and held in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive with the advisory that there are no known restrictions on publication; the Library of Congress record describes the building as the home of the Milwaukee Brewers and notes that it was completed in 2001. The Library of Congress control number is 2016631139. It is included because the empty apron across the foreground is the kind of ground the football stadium became, and because it is the only free-licensed view of the site that was reached.