From 1949 to 1955, hundreds of folks in Kentucky came together on Sunday afternoons to enjoy organized community baseball.

These small-town teams played against nearby rivals and crowned regular season and playoff champions.

One of those leagues existed in Central Kentucky and called itself the Tobacco League and thanks to a former player and his camera, the memories of this era are being preserved by his son.

So, the Tobacco League emerges between the Second World War and the Korean War, and it included teams from the cities of Lexington, Richmond, and Berea competing against teams from very small communities like Wildie, Waco, Ravenna, Bearwallow, Kirksville.

The Tobacco League Constitution stipulates the hierarchy of the league.

There was a president, a vice president, and a secretary treasurer.

The president was a young man named Fred Engle and he was 20 years old when the league began and he really was a key organizing force for the Tobacco League.

I think he had a vision for what he thought the league should be and how it should operate efficiently and effectively.

This wasn't exactly triple A level baseball.

It was highly organized and you had a lot of good baseball players but in many cases they were playing on somewhat primitive fields.

The field itself was a cow pasture.

It was a rather large field.

The center field part of it was dry.

The areas on the left field side, when it came a large rain, water stood there and it was play ball just like it wasn't there.

Right field fell off kind of at a slope and it was wet and muddy in that area.

My dad got to play right field so he would come in with mud all over him.

There was admission and from what I could tell, the admission was 25 cents a person.

That money was then used by the managers to buy equipment.

The players brought their own shoes and gloves but the teams paid for the bats and the balls.

And I really felt honored to be a part of that team because that team meant so much to the community.

I didn't get to play much at start because, you know, I was 13 or 14 so I knew that my time would come.

So, I went to all the games, I practiced and once in a while I would get put in a game if the game got a little one-sided.

But then, the next year, I improved some and I got to be a regular starter on the team.

14 years old, I became the shortstop of that baseball team.

On Sundays, the two biggest events when we had our ball game was church and the ball game.

Most of them went directly from the church house to the ball field, dressed up in Sunday dress.

I mean, everybody in the community attended the ball game.

We were country boys and we had played mostly from the time we were five years old in school.

Every school recess, you know, was a ball game.

So that's where we learned the game.

Our first team, it was made of people from my age which was 17 to at least 40 and maybe more than 40.

There were not many cameras, there were not many photographs.

My brother, Billy, was very interested in the recording.

So, he took a lot of pictures.

My nephew, Willie, has put together an exhibit with all the photos and brings back a lot of good memories.

My dad purchased a Mercury II camera sometime in the late 1940s.

He was not a professional photographer but I think that as a documentarian at heart, I think first and foremost, he really wanted to tell stories about this community in which he had grown up.

Putting the archive together, what I see is that this is a community that's really on the cusp of tremendous change.

And one of my favorite photos is the group of players sitting on a bank with a barbed wire fence behind them.

And it just seems like this incredibly romantic and poignant photo of this community that is sort of stranded in time.

But really what I see in looking at that is quite different.

This was a community that was about to face tremendous disruption.

Not only was the Korean War really heating up and players from Wildie would be called into service in the Korean War, but also the decade of the 1940s was a period of large out-migration from the Appalachian area.

A few hundred thousand Appalachians left the region in the 1940s in search of jobs and opportunities.

You know, young men and young people were leaving the region.

But what I see is just this moment in which tremendous change is coming to this small central Kentucky community.

But I think with the outbreak of the Korean War, Wildie lost its picture and catcher to being called to serve in Korea.

And you add in sort of out-migration and the changes that are coming to these communities, and I think that it was probably next to impossible for the Tobacco League to maintain a full slate of games in 1952.

I am the last survivor of that team at Wildie.

It may seem like a small kind of event, but looking back at that time, the Wildie baseball team was very important.

I was the youngest person on the team.

Now they're all gone, and I'm the only spokesman they have left.

I drive by the place sometimes, and now the field is not there, but I drive by the place sometimes, and I just stop and look and see, you know?

And I can picture everything how it used to be.

And I can tell everyone that listens to this that the people that were on that team would appreciate what you're doing.

To get the word out again, out of something that's been long gone, and preserve our history.

And you're doing a great service by doing that.

Sometimes life throws you a curve, you gotta be ready for it.