Travelin'

Toledo, OH also has the distinction of being the only city in history to be named after its minor league baseball team, the Toledo Mud Hens. You see, by 1908 a young entrepreneur by the name of Jeoffery T. Toledo of Asheville, North Carolina had amassed a small fortune by clear-cutting stands of Beech trees and selling the chips to the Anheuser-Busch company for use in their beechwood aging process which gave Budweiser its distinct flavor. Jeoffery T. Toledo (or “JTT” for short) used his modest fortune to form the Asheville Fightin’ Roosters in 1915. However, as Prohibition began in 1919, Toledo’s beechwood stands were no longer profitable and the stadium fell into such a state of disrepair that the rival The Durham Bulls began to mock the the team and their playing surface, calling them “Toledo’s Mud Hens.”

By the time the Great Depression hit in 1929, the Asheville Fightin’ Roosters were clean out of money. In a valiant effort to keep his players and their families employed, Toledo packed up the entire team and moved them out to the rugged, barren land called “Ohio.” It was here that the team themselves formed a small commune that would later blossom into the shining riverside metropolis known as “Toledo,” named after the team’s Owner-Patriarch. Much of the team’s success is owed to Toledo’s insistence on retaining the Mud Hen moniker, because in the Dust Bowl years of the early 1930’s mud was seen as a sign of prosperity and growth.