Athletic Park / Spudder Park

The Spudders' best year was 1927. After winning the Texas League championship, they also won the Dixie Series against the Southern Association champion, the only Dixie Series title the club ever took. The club began as the Irish Lads in 1911 and played as the Drillers in 1912 and 1913. On the east side, Spudder Field, opened in 1919, drew by one local account a sellout 8,635 in 1920 for a game against Babe Ruth's exhibition team. After the franchise was sold in 1932, the city made it a community park.

What the plaque says

Athletic Park / Spudder Park Wichita Falls citizens of the early 1900s enjoyed local games of baseball. In 1914, Bob Carruth formed a team for African Americans, later named the Black Spudders, in the Texas Colored League. As the city experienced an influx of funds due to an oil boom, local businessmen William Harvey and W. Newton Maer purchased the Waco Navigators in 1919 and hired Walter Salm to manage the team. The newly formed Wichita Falls Baseball Association purchased a 20-acre tract of land on 7th Street and built the Athletic Park Complex with a 5,000 person grandstand. The Spudders, named by resident Grace Morse in a public contest, joined the Texas League from 1920-1932. Both the Spudders and the Black Spudders shared the Athletic Park facilities. Baseball greats such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jerome "Dizzy" Dean played in exhibition games. The Spudders enjoyed success in the Texas League, finishing with a winning record ten times and winning the league championship in 1927. However, the Depression and slowing local oil production took a toll on both teams' profitability. In 1930, the Black Spudders were sold to Galveston. The next year, the Spudders were relocated to Longview. In 1941, the Wichita Falls Baseball Association purchased the Midland Cowboys of the West Texas-New Mexico League and moved them to what locals affectionately referred to as "Spudder Park." The team later moved to the Big State League, winning the league championship in 1953. Their league closed in 1957, and baseball did not return to Wichita Falls. The city later removed Spudder Park's grandstands and reworked the site for community recreation and events, including city baseball games on the original baseball diamond. (2023)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• World's Littlest Skyscraper — 0.3 mi
  A four-story brick tower in downtown Wichita Falls, 40 feet tall and 10 feet wide, the leftover of a 1919 oil-boom office deal in which, the story goes, investors misread inches as feet.
• Kell House Museum — 0.9 mi
  The 1909 Classic Revival house of Frank Kell, the miller and railroad builder who helped make Wichita Falls a city, shown by guided tour with its family furniture still in place.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 12 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 18 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.

More markers nearby

• Site of St. James Hotel — 0.3 mi
• Dr. Anne Elizabeth Davis Roark — 0.3 mi
• The Zale Legacy — 0.3 mi
• O'Donohoe, John F. — 0.3 mi