Devereux Meadow

Devereux Meadow in Raleigh, NC, was the home of Raleigh affiliated baseball from 1938 through 1971. After that, the Raleigh-Durham Triangles of the Carolina League folded.

Raleigh built and opened it in 1938 on land that had served as a playground for years. The home of the Carolina League's Raleigh franchise, which went by Capitals most of its years, was located near downtown. It was bounded by a section of present-day Capital Boulevard that was then Dawson Street, Peace Street and North West Street. Right field was remarkably short - so much so that home runs often flew over not only that wall but the street outside.

City Hall to City Hall, Raleigh and Durham are barely 20 miles apart. While there clearly was Negro Leagues baseball in the market, it appears most if not all was played in Durham.

Until 1968, Raleigh had its own team that played all its home games here. The last to do so was the 1967 Raleigh Pirates, but the franchise dated to 1945. The club's home schedule was cut in half when it merged franchises with Durham, with the resulting team splitting its home games between Devereux and Durham Athletic Park. The merged team went through two parent clubs in its first two seasons, went without in the next two, and then folded. Durham would regain baseball with a 1980 Carolina League expansion franchise that would become iconic with the film Bull Durham (1988), but professional baseball would not return to Raleigh.

Modern-day territorial rights preclude Raleigh from having affiliated baseball in deference to the Triple-A Durham Bulls. A 1990s effort to bring the Carolina League back to Raleigh bounced off that roadblock and into Zebulon, NC, as the Carolina Mudcats.

Devereux was torn down and replaced by a parking lot in 1979.