Devereux Meadow
On the north side of downtown Raleigh is a weedy parking lot tucked between roaring Capital Boulevard and a quiet creek that looks suspiciously like a drainage ditch. It’s a forgotten corner of a city that has undergone enormous growth in recent decades, but step back a mere sixty years and you would find yourself in the middle of the diamond at a time when Raleigh was a sleepy Southern capital and baseball was king.
The Park & Its Dimensions
Constructed in 1938 with Works Progress Administration funds, Devereux Meadow would be Raleigh’s home for baseball until the late 1970s.
(That’s only halfway true, as Chavis Park hosted the Raleigh Tigers of the Negro American League while baseball was still segregated. I highly encourage you to read more about the Tigers here and here; it’s a fascinating look at a largely unknown part of sporting history in the Triangle.)
The place wasn’t stunning to look at. Most of the park was made of wood, save the tin roof covering the home plate grandstand. Part of the outfield wall was a chain-link fence, and the rest of it was plastered in advertisements. A large open-air stand extended down the first base line, but the seating capacity only totaled a few thousand.
The park was named after a well-off 19th century Raleigh family. It shared the name with an existing nearby street off Glenwood Avenue, but was and is still commonly misspelled as Devereaux in various articles and even a 1941 city directory. The old-timey, almost poetic sounding name is in stark contrast to today’s minor leagues, where nearly every new stadium moniker is slapped with a sponsorship.
As for dimensions, I was unable to locate the exact measurements of Devereux Meadow (if they even existed), but we can get a pretty close estimate thanks to old satellite imagery and Google Maps. A few newspaper sources I found said it was about 315 feet to the left field foul pole, and my Maps measurement of 316' lines up well. For the other distances, I had to match up that 1968 satellite image of the area with the current view. Then I drew the diagram below, marking the outfield walls, foul lines, infield, and general seating areas.
Left field: 316'; Left center: 326'; Straightaway center field: 378'; Deep right center: 422'; Right center: 375'; Right field: 358'.
But after looking at the aerial view below, I question those center field measurements. It appears as if there is another wall that essentially cuts off the deep right center field corner:
Adjusting for that, the diagram looks like this:
That would make that section of right center field somewhere in the 375'-380' range, which is about the same distance from home as straightaway center. Even with those shallower center field numbers, the amount of fair territory still ends up being larger than Durham Bulls Athletic Park (~2.32 ac vs. ~2.30 ac) according to my imprecise Google Maps measurements. It wasn’t a big ball field by any means, but it wasn’t anything outrageously tiny either, like some other minor league parks of yesteryear.
The Teams That Called It Home
The city of Raleigh had been without a pro team since its Piedmont League franchise folded in 1932. Devereux Meadow hosted professional baseball for the first time in 1945 with the birth of the Carolina League and a brand new Raleigh Capitals squad. The Capitals were immediately one of the best teams in the fledgling league, making the first three league championship series and winning two of them (both times defeating the nearby Durham Bulls in the finals). The latter half of the 1940s and the early 1950s would be the peak of baseball’s popularity in Raleigh. By 1954, when the Capitals took a brief four year hiatus, the team had collected two league championships and three pennants in nine years of existence.
Although the Capitals came back in 1958 as a Boston Red Sox farm team, the 1959 season was the real return to success for the club, and a 19 year old infielder named Carl Yastrzemski had a lot to do with it. The future hall-of-famer played 120 games for the Capitals, splitting time at second base and shortstop, and hit 15 homers while driving in 100 runs and putting up a slash line of .377/.472/.579 on his way to winning the Carolina League MVP award. The Capitals would fall to the Wilson Tobs in the championship series. Yaz only spent one year in Raleigh.
The 60s were a turbulent decade for the Raleigh club. After their third and final year as a Red Sox farm team, the Capitals switched affiliations to the New York Mets for the 1961 season. That partnership lasted one year, and in the following years the Capitals struggled to find consistency on and off the diamond. After briefly joining the Washington system for the 1962 season, the Raleigh club would affiliate themselves with the Mets (again), the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Despite winning the 1967 pennant after finishing with the league’s best regular season record, the team was sold and merged with the Durham Bulls. From 1968 to 1971, the Raleigh-Durham team would play half of its home games in Durham at Durham Athletic Park, and the other half in Raleigh at a deteriorating Devereux Meadow. After the 1971 season, professional baseball in Raleigh was done for good.
Devereux Meadow didn’t last very long without a tenant. After rotting away for a few years, the park was completely demolished in 1979.
The Present & Future
The spot where the stadium once stood is one of the main entrances to downtown Raleigh. Thousands of visitors and daily commuters enter the center city by Capital Boulevard every day. This is what they see:
Currently, the city uses the parking lot to house its sanitation trucks. I think the location has potential for much, much more. It’s about a five minute walk to the Glenwood South district, and about a twenty minute walk to the science and history museums (although that could be shortened with improved pedestrian connections). If developed properly, the area could be a terrific “front door” to the rest of downtown.
Map key: 1 is Devereux Meadow, 2 the center of the Glenwood South district, 3 the state museums, 4 the brand new Union Station set to open in 2018, and 5 is Fayetteville Street.
I’ve been interested in this section of the city for a long time. Back in high school, I imagined a re-designed Capital Boulevard (making it more like an actual European-style boulevard instead of highway). A new minor-league ballpark was hemmed in by the boulevard and Pigeon House creek alongside a revitalized West Street. Light rail trains (although I wrote “streetcar” on the drawing) would run up and down the railroad tracks immediately to the west of West Street. New businesses would sprout beside the light rail line, and eventually connecting with Glenwood South if you headed south to Peace and Harrington streets. Just beyond the right field wall would be a large open green space (in the style of the Sheep’s Meadow in New York) — an actual Devereux meadow.
It’s all a bit far-fetched but that’s what makes it fun.
An improved Devereux Meadow, whether that’s done by building a city park (which the city has talked about for years), “daylighting” Pigeon House creek, or even my pie-in-the-sky dream of a new ballpark, would go a long way toward reversing the damage that Capital Boulevard did to this side of the city. The area is gearing up for development but I think the city would do well to make Devereux Meadow a focal point, and to recognize and celebrate its golden years as Raleigh’s little baseball temple.
Sources and Further Reading:
Ballpark Digest: “Reviving Devereux Meadows.”
The Charlotte Observer: “Here’s one way that a Raleigh soccer park will almost certainly fall short.”
Chris J. Holaday: Professional baseball in North Carolina: an illustrated city-by-city history, 1901–1996
The News & Observer: “Devereux Meadow was Raleigh’s gritty baseball shrine.”
The Raleigh Connoisseur: “Baseball In Downtown, Devereux Meadow Meets Progress In Raleigh.”
Reinvent Your Wheel: “Capital Blvd: Raleigh’s Great Divide.”
Walter Magazine: “A secret park: The ghost of Devereux Meadow ballpark is alive and well.”
