NC Baseball Museum packed with state’s heritage

This story appears in the summer issue of Wilsonian.

Baseball means more in North Carolina, and one place immortalizes that greater than any other is the N.C. Baseball Museum.

The museum is connected to historic Fleming Stadium, which has seen a storied history of its own, from an Elvis Presley concert to a Negro League game where a team full of future Hall of Famers played on the same team.

Marshall Lamm, museum curator, said the museum celebrates every facet of the game’s long, storied history in North Carolina.

“There’s a lot of heritage here,” Lamm said. “We try to touch on the broad strokes. We’ve got about 160 years of really good history to cover. We try to highlight the minor league teams that have played here. We try to highlight some of the high school and college teams that have been really successful in North Carolina. There’s local appeal, statewide appeal. There’s a lengthy statewide connection to baseball.”

The museum has a large portion of space dedicated to every native North Carolinian who’s played a single at bat in Major League Baseball — from Topps trading cards bearing players’ images in college or minor league attire, all the way up to signed hats, gloves, portraits and more.

“If a North Carolinian made the major leagues, we want to represent them in this area,” Lamm said. “It’s both folks that were born and raised here and folks that moved and were raised here. You get guys like Carlos Rodón who was born in Florida, but he played middle and high school baseball here. As long as they had a significant portion of their youth baseball played here in North Carolina, we consider them North Carolinians. We try to represent a little bit of everyone who’s made it to the big show and show off the history of baseball in North Carolina.”

The museum has sections dedicated to each of the MLB’s North Carolina native Hall of Famers: Luke Appling, Rick Ferrell, Jim “Catfish” Hunter, Gaylord Perry, Buck Leonard, Enos Slaughter and Hoyt Wilheim.

The collection contains pieces you won’t be able to find in National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, such as one of three pairs of Enos Slaughter’s flip-up glasses, a one-of-a-kind diagram drawn by Gaylord Perry explaining the technical nature of his pitch on the backside of a restaurant place mat and a baseball card from 1909 likely printed right here in Wilson.

“In 20 years, we’ve managed to take our collection and evolve it,” Lamm said. “It’s a perpetual work in progress. It’s not like certain historical subjects where you’re looking back at a certain era, certain thing. You’re always going to have more history to interpret every year as time moves on.”

The N.C. Baseball Museum is primarily funded through its annual Wilson Hot Stove banquet and golf tournament fundraisers. Lamm said the museum also pulls in a little funding through admission and the Tobs’ gift shop.

The museum, located at Fleming Stadium, 300 Stadium St. SW, is open Thursday and Friday from 1-4 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 1-5 p.m. Admission is $3 for adults and $1 for children and seniors with discounted group rates available by request. If you find yourself at a Wilson Tobs game this summer and need a moment to escape the heat, step inside the museum and see what 200 years of baseball has done for our state.

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