Natchez Pilgrims

The Natchez Pilgrims, based in Natchez, Mississippi, were one of the few franchises in the predominantly Louisiana circuit to represent another state, and they came to Natchez by an unusual route. The 1940 franchise began the season in Houma, Louisiana, as the Houma Buccaneers, before that team's poor attendance prompted owner Carlos Moore to relocate the club on June 27, finishing the year across the state line as the Pilgrims. Natchez returned with a full 1941 season before reappearing briefly in 1942 as the Natchez Giants, a New York Giants affiliate, until the league folded May 30 with the country at war.

The Pilgrims name suited the city well. Natchez is one of the oldest European settlements on the Mississippi River, sitting on high bluffs above the water at the southern terminus of the Natchez Trace, the nearly 450-mile historic trail stretching northeast toward Nashville. The pre-war circuit reached its tentacles into places like this not through proximity but through baseball's hunger for cities wherever someone would build a grandstand and sell a ticket.

The Evangeline League was a Class D minor league (Class C from 1949) that operated primarily in southern and central Louisiana from 1934 through 1957, with a wartime pause from 1943 through 1945. Named for the Acadian folk heroine of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1847 epic poem, the league was nicknamed the "Pepper Sauce League" or the "Tabasco Circuit" by fans and sportswriters, a nod to the Cajun country setting and the volatile brand of baseball played there.