Durkee Park

Main entrance to what is now J.P. Small Memorial Stadium, May-2020.

The seating bowl, as seen from beyond right field.

The ballpark looks out on the Durkeeville neighborhood.

• Location: Myrtle Avenue at 7th Street, Jacksonville, Fla. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1912 as Barrs Field (stadium rebuilt 1936, renovated 1980)
• Additional names: Durkee Park (1926), J.P. Small Memorial Stadium (1980)
• Home team: Jacksonville Scouts (1921), Indians (1922), Florida State League; Jacksonville Tars (1926-30), Southeastern League; Jacksonville Tars (1936-52), Braves (1953-54), South Atlantic League; Jacksonville Red Caps, Negro American League (1938, 1941-42); spring training: Philadelphia Athletics (1914-18), Pittsburgh Pirates (1918), New York Yankees (1919-20), Brooklyn Dodgers (1919-20, 1922); Edward Waters College Tigers, Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference
• Capacity: 4,000 (approx.)

The Jacksonville Tars came in for that 1926 season and lasted five years. A new Tars team, playing in a higher league, arrived for 1936, the year the ballpark was rebuilt following a fire. That club was purchased by Samuel Wolfson prior to the 1953 season, and he relocated the team to a new ballpark in the shadow of the Gator Bowl football stadium.

In 1980, Durkee Park was saved from the wrecking ball and renovated. The stadium was renamed for J.P. Small, a longtime coach and athletic director at the city’s Stanton High School, whose baseball teams used the field in the years following its pro ball tenure. The facility’s rescue makes it one of the few ballparks around the country to see Negro League play during its heyday and still stand; the Jacksonville Red Caps spent parts of three seasons here. Edward Waters College, which uses the ballpark to this day, is a historically black institution that claims Hall of Famer Buck O’Neil as an attendee in the 1930s.