The Danville Fairgrounds, where Ballou Shopping Park is today, once offered a space for lively baseball games sponsored by Dan River. These baseball games regularly occurred on Saturday afternoons from May to September beginning in 1915 when Dan River constructed a simple wood-frame ballpark on the grounds. A more extensive mill-sponsored program began in 1920 with the creation of the “Schoolfield Base Ball Association” and the start of the Bi-State League, a cooperative league of mill teams in Virginia and North Carolina. These programs were run out of the Schoolfield YMCA with the Schoolfield Baseball Association playing locally against Dan River’s Riverside Division and Danville teams. In the Bi-State League, the Schoolfield Baseball Association played other mill teams from the North Carolina towns of Reidsville, Thomasville, Burlington, and the textile trio of Leaksville-Spray-Draper. All these towns were within easy travel distance by train, which was promoted to baseball tourists in the Bi-State League’s season schedule booklets with the inclusion of railway timetables.
Management hoped that through the “friendly and contagious enthusiasm” of baseball, they could encourage village pride. Mill management preferred group harmony readily gave a chunk of the YMCA’s budget to recruit and retain skilled ball players who moonlighted as millhands for the company. The rest of the baseball budget came from the public through ticket sales, and through Schoolfield millhands themselves, who were expected to buy shares in the Schoolfield Baseball Association to help pay for team expenses.
Though the league later evolved into an intramural company league (and eventually an intramural softball league), the original field near Ballou Park was used continuously for Danville baseball until 1962. That year, a new pastime overtook baseball: shopping. By 1963, the old wooden park was dismantled and, in its place, the modern Ballou Park Shopping Center was constructed and is still in use today.
“Groundbreaking Slated Next Tuesday for Ballou Park Shopping Center,” The Danville Register. October 10, 1962.
These photos and materials from the 1920s show the lively participation of mill workers in the Dan River and Riverside Divisions. Courtesy of UNC-Chapel Hill Southern Historical Collection Dan River Mills Inc.
A 1920 poster calling all interested parties to meet for the planning of a baseball league. Courtesy of UNC-Chapel Hill Southern Historical Collection Dan River Mills Inc.
See also:
Dan River Mills, Inc., Records #5793, the Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Box 34.
Herring, Harriet L. Welfare Work in Mill Villages : The Story of Extra-Mill Activities in North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1929, pp. 137, 141.
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher Daley. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. 2000 ed. The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, pp. 136, 137.
schoolfieldvillage.com 