Waycross Bears
The Waycross Bears, based in Waycross, Georgia, were the Georgia-Florida League's dominant franchise, winning five championships across their run from 1939 through 1955: 1940, 1942, 1948, 1949, and 1951. Waycross sat at the northern edge of the Okefenokee Swamp in southeastern Georgia, and the Bears drew the league's highest single-season attendance in 1939 at 85,566 fans.
Baseball in Waycross long predated the Bears. In the 1920s, Shoeless Joe Jackson, permanently banned from organized baseball following the 1919 Black Sox scandal, played for and managed the semiprofessional Waycross Coast Liners, guiding them to the Georgia state title in 1924. The Bears posted only two losing seasons in their fifteen years under that name. In 1954 the franchise signed Silas Harmon, Perry Bellamy, and Lew Jones, among the first Black players to appear in the Class D Georgia-Florida League.
When the Milwaukee Braves established their minor league spring training complex outside the city on a decommissioned airfield, the franchise became a Braves affiliate and renamed itself the Waycross Braves in 1956. The Georgia-Florida League folded after 1958; Waycross fielded one final Braves affiliate team during the short-lived 1963 revival. The Georgia-Florida League was a Class D circuit that ran, with a wartime interruption from 1943 through 1945, from 1935 through 1958, fielding teams primarily from south Georgia with occasional representation from Florida and Alabama.
