Winston-Salem has always been a community that has had a kind of a unique connection, one that a hundred-plus years ago didn’t exist. “Beyond that, it represents the connection within the community. “The Dash represents the dash in Winston-Salem,” Boesch said. That new name for the team in the new ballpark would come from that tiny but symbolic bit of punctuation between Winston and Salem. We wanted it to kind of signal a whole new period of time in our organization.” “It was the main motivation there, going downtown, going into a new ballpark. “The Warthogs are still well regarded and well remembered in this town and they will be for a long time,” Boesch said. When the team moved to its shiny new home at BB&T Ballpark, named for the financial services giant headquartered in town, they decided it was time for a new name. “A White Sox affiliate probably couldn’t be named the Twins,” said Brian Boesch, the team’s Associate Director of Media Relations and Broadcasting.īetween 19, baseball teams in Winston-Salem would go by the names Cardinals (1945–1953), Red Birds (1957–1960), Red Sox (1961–1983), Spirits (1984–1994), and Warthogs (1995–2008). Seems like there’s a potential minor league nickname there.) When the current team was choosing a new name in 2009, there was one important reason not to reprise that original Twins moniker. (It’s worth noting that another of Winston-Salem’s nicknames is the Camel City because of its importance to the tobacco industry. The Twins name came from Winston-Salem’s nickname among locals, the Twin City. Via North Carolina Miscellany.Īnother entity that referred to the two cities as one was the minor league baseball Winston-Salem Twins, who first appeared on the scene in 1905-a full eight years before the official merger. In 1913, another public referendum in the two cities established what the Post Office already knew, that Winston-Salem should be united as one. The two existed separately for decades-including for more than 30 years after a failed referendum to unite the cities in 1879-until the US Post Office, always the forward-thinking fashion-maker, established a post office in 1899 that referred to the towns as the unified name of Winston-Salem. About a century later, the town of nearby Winston was established. The town of Salem in what would become North Carolina was settled and established by members of the Moravian Church in the mid-1700s. I’ve discovered a lot of unique team name origins in the course of writing this Story Behind the Nickname series, but just when I had given up my dream of finding a team that combined two of my passions, baseball and punctuation, I stumble across the Winston-Salem Dash.
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