Small Town Buys Baseball Team

The donations came from all over town, ranging from $10 to $2,500. Everyone, it seemed, wanted the local Coastal Plain League team to stay in Edenton.

And that’s just what happened.

“It was pretty amazing,” said Katy Ebersole, who owns a restaurant in town with her husband.

The CPL, a summertime collection of college players with 14 teams in the Carolinas and Virginia, put a team in this small town in 1998, then started looking for a buyer two years later. Afraid someone might take the Steamers elsewhere, a group of locals got together and formed a board of directors to see if enough money could be raised to purchase the team.

The asking price was $125,000, and after accumulating about 75 percent of the money, the rest was borrowed. The franchise was theirs.

“It’s tremendously unique,” CPL president Pete Bock said. “Anything that Edenton sets its mind to, it can do. I love that community, I love everything about it. And what they’ve done with the team, owning it and operating it and managing the money, has been tremendous.”

Ebersole was elected president of the board, and six years later, she’s still holding the position.

“They tell me it’s a lifetime position, but I’m not so sure about that,” she said with a laugh.

The support of the town didn’t stop when it bought the team. At every game, volunteers sell programs, hot dogs and several other items at Hicks Field, and they handle some of the field preparation, along with a full-time groundskeeper.

And despite having the smallest market in the league -- a population of about 5,000 -- the Steamers still manage to draw close to 1,000 for each game.

“The town support is just amazing,” said shortstop Ryan Khoury, who is playing in Edenton for the second consecutive summer. “Everybody around town knows you play for the Steamers, so they’re always encouraging us to win and stuff like that.”

With very little going on in town during the summer -- Ebersole lists the entertainment choices as “us and the movie theater” -- not going to a game seems downright unfriendly.

All around town, small signs announce what time the game starts that night, including at the local Tastee Freeze drive-in and near the historic downtown area. Edenton proclaims itself to be the first permanent settlement in North Carolina, and it served as a colonial capital in the 1700s.

So amid all the older homes that serve as bed and breakfast inns stands Hicks Field, which opened in the 1930s as a Works Progress Administration project. The dimensions are a bit crowded, with the wall in right just 298 feet from home plate, but it clearly has the nostalgic feeling that most ballparks seek.