Columbus Foxes

The Columbus Foxes, based in Columbus, Georgia, played from 1909 through 1917 in the Class C circuit spanning Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida, then returned for a second run from 1926 through 1932 and a third from 1956 through 1958. Across those three stretches the Foxes were the longest-running name Columbus baseball ever had.

The first run ended abruptly. The 1914 club went 55-67 behind Phil Redding, who struck out 184 batters to lead the league. Three seasons later, on May 19, 1917, Columbus disbanded mid-season along with Macon as the league contracted under wartime pressure, and the circuit shortened its schedule to end on the Fourth of July.

Columbus had first appeared in professional baseball much earlier, fielding the Stars in the Southern League in 1885 and the Babies in 1896. The Foxes name outlasted both by decades and stretched across three separate eras of the city's baseball history.

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. Columbus sat at the western edge of a league built almost entirely on mid-sized Southern cities of exactly that kind.