Bowman Field: Baseball's Second-Oldest Diamond

Built in nineteen twenty-six, Bowman Field in Williamsport holds a rare distinction: it is Pennsylvania's oldest operating minor league baseball park and one of the oldest in the entire country. The first professional game here was played on April twenty-seventh, nineteen twenty-six, between the Williamsport Grays and the Harrisburg Giants of the Negro leagues. That pairing on opening day, bringing a Negro league team to a new park's inaugural professional game, reflects a complicated history of Black baseball in the minor leagues during the segregation era.

The park was originally called Memorial Field and renamed in nineteen twenty-nine for J. Walton Bowman. Over the decades it hosted a succession of Williamsport teams and welcomed major league clubs for exhibition games.

It still stands and still draws crowds, a working ballpark from an era when most of its contemporaries have long since been demolished.