South Boston Wrappers

South Boston, Virginia, a Halifax County tobacco market town on the Roanoke River, entered the Bi-State League in 1937 as the South Boston Twins, then adopted the Wrappers name in 1938 as a combined South Boston-Halifax franchise before settling as the South Boston Wrappers through 1940. The Wrappers name was tobacco-specific: wrapper leaf is the high-grade outer tobacco used to roll cigars, distinct from filler, and the South Boston area was deep in the bright-leaf belt where auction warehouses and processing operations defined the local economy. The design on this shirt takes the name at face value: a baseball wrapped in a tobacco wrapper leaf, the edge of the leaf folding across the ball's surface the way a cigar wrapper folds across a tobacco roll.

The Wrappers were a lower-half club through most of their run, finishing seventh in 1937 and 1938 at 43-68 and 43-77 respectively, improving slightly to seventh again in 1939 before a fifth-place finish in 1940 at 56-60. The franchise folded when the Bi-State League suspended operations due to World War II, and South Boston did not return to professional baseball.

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.