Rockford Rox
Rockford, Illinois, has a long history of minor league baseball, and one of its earlier clubs was the Rox. The Rockford Rox started play in the Three-I League (the Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League) in 1917. In the late 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.
The Rox were a solid team in the Three-I, finishing second in the standings in three of their six seasons. The team did not come back for 1924. It took about twenty years for another minor league team to come to Rockford, and it revived the Rox name in the Central Association from 1947 to 1949. During those years, of course, there was a more famous team in Rockford: the Rockford Peaches of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
