Baseball long a staple in Columbia’s mill villages

Baseball had been played in Columbia since 1867 when Union soldiers garrisoning the Capital City after the Civil War played local club teams like the Robert E. Lees.

Professional baseball began in 1904 when the Columbia Skyscrapers played at Elmwood field, the site of the former State Fairgrounds, located where the Elmwood Park neighborhood is today.

At about the same time, textile leagues popped up featuring players from the tightly knit textile communities in the Midlands and Upstate – such as the Olympia and Granby mill villages. They were intended not only to entertain village residents, but to boost community morale.

The unqualified support of mill owners also turned the burgeoning textile league squads into highly competitive teams that increasingly sought out excellent athletes. In the 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s, textile league baseball featured teams of quality, perhaps on a par with the midlevel professional minor leagues, according to the book “South Carolina’s Mill Teams 1880-1955,” by Thomas K. Perry.

But the textile leagues dried up in the mid-1950s because of declining financial support, sociological changes that depleted mill villages and the spread of television as a new source of entertainment, Perry wrote.

The professional game continued in Columbia with several teams and several locations from 1904 until 1927. That year, Pittsburgh Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss built a ballpark for the Columbia Commissioners on Assembly Street near the Olympia and Granby communities, on land once occupied by a stagnant pond that Olympia Mill Village officials said threatened the health of their residents.

“The question of drainage was also brought up,” The State newspaper wrote in 1926, “and the supposition was put forth that portions of the land might be soggy in wet weather, but it was said that almost any baseball field would have this characteristic.”

Dreyfuss Dell, as the stadium was called, was a soggy home for minor league baseball for the next eight decades – off and on depending on whether the town had a team.

It hosted teams named the Sandlappers, the Senators, the Reds, the Gems, the Reds again, the Mets and, finally, the Capital City Bombers, which left in 2005 for a new stadium in Greenville.

From 2006 to 2014, the Columbia Blowfish, a Coastal Plain collegiate summer baseball league team, played in Capital City Stadium until departing for a new stadium in Lexington County. Today, Capital City Stadium sits vacant. A developer plans to build a Kroger grocery store at the site.

In February 2009, a new University of South Carolina baseball park, Carolina Stadium, was built adjacent to Granby mill village. The Gamecocks won back-to-back college national championships in 2010 and 2011.

The Gamecock baseball team routinely ranks in the top five nationally among major colleges in average home attendance.

Today, the stadium is called Founders Park.

This story was originally published May 21, 2016 at 11:45 PM with the headline "Baseball long a staple in Columbia’s mill villages."