[1][2] The field is named in honor of Breese J. Stevens (1834–1903), a mayor of Madison and a University of Wisconsin–Madison regent, on the wishes of his widow, who sold the land to the city.

[3] After first trying to obtain the land by donation, a joint committee of the council and the Association of Commerce considered sites such as Olbrich Park and what is today's Georgia O'Keeffe Middle School playground.

[4] The council ultimately selected a block of 18 lots fronting East Washington Avenue and bounded by Mifflin, Brearly and Paterson streets.

[5] To help raise money for the project, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Burr W. Jones consented to the selling of property at Livingston and East Washington that he had previously donated to the city as a playground, on condition the new athletic field be named for him.

[9] The stone wall surrounding the perimeter was built in 1934 as a project of the Civil Works Administration using quarry rock from Madison's Hoyt Park.

[10] The first night-baseball game in Wisconsin was held at the field on July 7, 1930, resulting in a defeat for the California Owls, a team that toured with its own floodlights.

The lights were credited with saving scholastic sports when high schools began collecting one-third of the gate receipts from their night games.

A multi-purpose facility with a cinder track, the field was employed year-round for sports, ranging from marbles tournaments[16] to National Football League games.

Founded by the Madison Athletic Association and captained by manager Eddie Lenehan,[18] the Blues were first an independent team before joining the Wisconsin-Illinois League in 1926.

[27] In the spring of 1932 the Madison city council opened the field's gates to amateur baseball, allowing twenty teams in two leagues to play free games on Sundays.

[35] Jesse Owens, gold medalist sprinter of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, ran in three exhibition races at the field in 1938 as part of an in-game promotion at a matchup between the Madison Blues and the Fort Wayne Harvesters.

The AUDL championship weekend was held at Breese Stevens Field for the second time, on August 11–12, 2018, and concluded with the Radicals earning their first league title.

[40] By the late 1960s, Breese Stevens Field lost its status as the city's premier athletic complex as modern facilities, such as Mansfield Stadium, began to appear in suburban Madison.

On August 3, 1968, a weekly teen dance held at Breese broke out in racially charged fights, with the violence escalating outside when a black teenager was struck by a car that was then attacked.

[42] Three years later the city removed legal obstacles to making the field part of a planned East Washington Avenue campus for Madison Area Technical College, but support for site dropped.

Minor league baseball returned to Breese on April 27, 1982, when the Madison Muskies made their debut there before adopting Warner Park as their home field.