Mineola Black Spiders
Mineola, Wood County, Texas
Marker Inscription
IN THE 1800s AND INTO THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, AFRICAN-AMERICAN BASEBALL TEAMS PLAYED SEPARATELY FROM WHITE TEAMS. THE COMMUNITY OF MINEOLA, THOUGH SMALL IN POPULATION, HAD BOTH WHITE AND BLACK BASEBALL TEAMS. THE MINEOLA BLACK SPIDERS WAS COMPOSED OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN MEN AND YOUTH FROM THE TOWN. THE BALLPLAYERS WORE SOLID GRAY UNIFORMS AND PLAYED AT EPPERSON PARK IN SOUTH MINEOLA, IN ADDITION TO TRAVELING TO GAMES IN DALLAS, COMMERCE, SHREVEPORT (LOUISIANA), AND OTHER PLACES. HOME GAMES SOMETIMES ATTRACTED AROUND 200 SPECTATORS. VERNON KLINGAMAN, WHO MOVED TO TEXAS IN THE LATE 1920s, SETTLING IN MINEOLA, SOON BECAME INVOLVED WITH THE TEAM. HE EXPANDED THE ROSTER, OPENING IT TO NON-RESIDENTS, AND CHANGED THE NAME TO THE TEXAS BLACK SPIDERS. IN 1932, THE PLAYERS DEPARTED MINEOLA FOR THE MIDWEST, BECOMING A BARNSTORMING TEAM, STAGING EXHIBITION GAMES IN VARIOUS LOCATIONS. THAT YEAR, THE TEAM UNDERWENT A NAME CHANGE, BECOMING THE MASON CITY BLACK BATS. THEY HEADQUARTERED IN IOWA, THOUGH MOST MEMBERS WOULD RETURN TO THE SPIDERS’ SQUAD, WHILE OTHERS MOVED BACK TO TEXAS. THE BLACK SPIDERS GAINED A REPUTATION AS BEING ONE OF THE FASTEST TEAMS FROM THE SOUTH. THEY WERE ALSO VERY SUCCESSFUL; IN 1936, THE SPIDERS’ RECORD WAS 34-1. HOWEVER, BY 1937, THERE WAS A SUBSTANTIAL TURNOVER IN TEAM PERSONNEL. THE BLACK SPIDERS FIELDED A TEAM IN 1938, BUT DISBANDED AFTERWARD. TODAY, THE TEAM IS MOSTLY FORGOTTEN IN MINEOLA. HOWEVER, THE BLACK SPIDERS REMAIN A SIGNIFICANT PART OF THE COMMUNITY’S HISTORY AS A BLACK BASEBALL TEAM THAT BECAME A SUCCESS LOCALLY AND IN THE MIDWESTERN UNITED STATES.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the segregated decades before integration, the small town of Mineola fielded the Black Spiders, an African American baseball club of local men and youths who played in gray uniforms at Epperson Park and traveled to games as far as Dallas and Shreveport. Under Vernon Klingaman the roster expanded and the team turned barnstorming in 1932, headquartering briefly in Iowa as the Mason City Black Bats before returning to Texas. Fast and formidable, the Spiders posted a 34-1 record in 1936 before disbanding after 1938.
Why it matters
The Black Spiders are a grassroots chapter of the Negro baseball story, showing how even a small Southern town sustained a Black team that won fame across the South and Midwest during the era of segregation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
For roughly the first half of the twentieth century, and well back into the 1800s, American baseball was rigidly segregated. Black players were shut out of the white major and minor leagues, so African American communities built a parallel baseball world of their own — a network of independent clubs, semipro nines, and traveling teams that became a source of enormous local pride and joy.
Mineola, in Wood County, was a small East Texas town, but small size did not mean small ambition. Like many communities of the era, it fielded both white and Black baseball teams, playing separately under the rules of segregation. Out of the town's African American residents came the Mineola Black Spiders, a club of local men and youths who carried the community's name onto the field.
This was the age when baseball truly was the national pastime, woven into the rhythm of small-town life. A ballgame on a Sunday afternoon was entertainment, social gathering, and civic identity all at once — and for a Black community in the segregated South, a winning team was also a powerful statement of excellence in a society determined to deny it.
People & events
The Black Spiders wore solid gray uniforms and played their home games at Epperson Park in south Mineola, where a good contest could draw around 200 spectators. They did not stay home, though — they traveled to face teams in Dallas, Commerce, and across the state line in Shreveport, Louisiana, among other places, building a reputation well beyond their own county.
Everything changed when Vernon Klingaman, who came to Texas in the late 1920s and settled in Mineola, became involved with the club. He expanded the roster and opened it to players from outside the town, then renamed the team the Texas Black Spiders. In 1932 the players left Mineola for the Midwest and became a barnstorming team — a traveling club that made its living staging exhibition games town to town. That same year they took on yet another name, the Mason City Black Bats, headquartered in Iowa, though most of the men would return to the Spiders' squad while others came back to Texas.
On the field they were feared. The Spiders earned a name as one of the fastest teams from the South and posted a remarkable 34-1 record in 1936. But baseball rosters are fragile things: by 1937 the team had turned over substantially. The Spiders fielded a squad once more in 1938 before disbanding for good.
Its place in the American story
The famous names of Negro-league history — the great city clubs and their legendary stars — are only the visible peak of a much larger world. Beneath them stretched hundreds of local and regional teams like the Black Spiders, the grassroots foundation on which Black baseball rested. Their story shows that the Negro-baseball tradition was not confined to big cities; it lived in small Southern towns that sustained clubs good enough to win fame across whole regions.
The Spiders' path from a hometown nine to a barnstorming outfit ranging into the Midwest also traces one of the era's great human currents. As players chased opportunity northward, their movement mirrored the broader Great Migration of Black Americans out of the South. A ball club, in miniature, carried the same hopes: the search for a stage wide enough to match the talent.
That a team could go 34-1 yet be, as the marker notes, mostly forgotten in its own hometown speaks to how much of this history was nearly lost. Remembering the Black Spiders is part of restoring the full, national picture of who built and played America's game.
If you visit
Come to Mineola knowing you are visiting a place whose greatness on the diamond was very nearly erased from local memory. The marker itself is an act of recovery — a way of putting the Black Spiders back into the story of the town they represented.
Seek out the site of Epperson Park in south Mineola and picture a gray-uniformed home team taking the field before a crowd of around 200 neighbors, the players fast enough to earn a reputation across the South. Small-town ballfields have a particular feeling — close to the action, close to the community — and that intimacy is exactly what made a home game here matter.
Mineola sits in the piney country of East Texas and makes a fine stop on a heritage road trip through the region's small towns. Bring some imagination for the barnstorming years, too: from this modest starting point, these players ranged all the way to Iowa and back, carrying their hometown's name to crowds who had never heard of Wood County.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Vernon Klingaman
Themes & tags
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