Mount Airy Graniteers

Mount Airy, North Carolina, sits on one of the largest open-face granite deposits in the world, and its quarrying industry has supplied building stone across the eastern United States since the 1880s. The baseball team adopted the Graniteers name in 1934 as a direct reference to that industry, ran as the Mount Airy Reds from 1935 through 1937, then returned to Graniteers from 1938 through 1941. Gene Handley, playing for the 1936 Reds, batted .403 that season, second-highest average in the league. In 1940, the Graniteers had their best finish at 63-56, reaching the playoff semifinals before falling to the Bassett Furnituremakers.

The franchise competed across all eight seasons without winning a title or producing a famous alumni connection on the order of neighboring clubs, but the name itself does some of the work a larger history might provide: in a league saturated with textile and tobacco references, the Graniteers stand apart as one of the few clubs whose identity came from the ground under the town rather than its mills or warehouses.

The Bi-State League was a Class D circuit that ran from 1934 through 1942, fielding teams from the tobacco and textile country straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border. The league did not resume after World War II.