Bartow Polkers

The Bartow Polkers of Bartow, Florida were charter members of the new Class D league that brought professional baseball to central Florida in 1919. The nickname was a wink at the team's home turf: Bartow is the county seat of Polk County, and the club actually split its first season between two Polk County towns, playing as the Bartow-Winter Haven Polkers in 1919 before settling in Bartow alone for 1920.

The Polkers folded after the 1920 season, and Bartow never hosted professional baseball again. It remains one of the smallest towns ever to hold a charter membership in the circuit.

The Polkers' league began play in 1919 as a Class D circuit of six teams clustered across central Florida, tracing what would later become the I-4 corridor decades before the interstate existed. The circuit ran through 1928, went dark during the Depression, returned in 1936, paused again for World War II, and resumed in 1946. Unlike most minor leagues of the era, it never truly died; the same circuit still operates across Florida today.

In the 1800s and first half of the 1900s, teams existed in thousands of small towns across the United States, as Americans looked for recreational activities and entertainment in the era before TV.