Buckwalter Stadium

Home plate entrance and ticket windows at Buckwalter Stadium, Oct-2020.

A cross-section of the seating area.

From behind home plate, nothing but weed trees.

• Location: Sowashee Street at Rubush Avenue, Meridian, Miss. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1947
• Home team: Meridian Peps (1947-48), Millers (1949-50), Southeastern League; Meridian Millers (1952-54, second half of 1955), Cotton States League
• Capacity: 3,000

For the 1947 season, Buckwalter managed an affiliation with the Cleveland Indians, and by selling an interest in the club, he raised enough cash to build a ballpark across the street (“the street” being the US 11/80 bypass, now I-20/59). This was Buckwalter Stadium. The Peps played two seasons but Buckwalter was still losing money and sold off his remaining interest by 1949, and the team continued as the Millers. The club took a year off because the Southeastern League went out of business, but returned in the Cotton States League for three more seasons. The 1955 season was actually a relocation; the club had begun the year in Pine Bluff, Ark. but finished the year in Meridian, well to the southeast.

After 1955, the stadium became part of a larger fairgrounds complex that hosted the rotating Mississippi-Alabama State Fair. That project was successful, and entrepreneur Lloyd Royal also operated a drive-in theater (the screen still stands) as well as a theme park called Royal Land on the grounds for a few years, through 1969. The drive-in remained active through 1985, and the fairgrounds were last used around 1998. Today, the gates for Royal Land still stand, and so does the stadium structure, although the home plate area is a concrete pad (probably used as a concert stage during the fairgrounds days). The rest of the stadium is overgrown with trees but still in reasonable shape, and one can sort of imagine the short tenure of the facility for professional baseball.