Grand Duchess
The Grand Duchess baseball park in Fort Wayne has a real “you had to be there” kind of history — it’s best known as the home of the Fort Wayne Kekiongas, who played there in 1871 as part of the brand-new National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, making the park the site of what’s widely considered the first professional league game ever played. That original grandstand didn’t last long (it famously burned down later that same year), but baseball stuck around the location for decades under different park names, hosting a rotating cast of Fort Wayne teams — Indians, Farmers, Champs, Cubs, and more — across a grab bag of early leagues like the Inter-State League, Western Association, Central League, and the Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League from the late 1800s into the 1930s, before the ballpark era at the site finally faded out around 1940 — leaving behind a spot that quietly sits at the very beginning of pro baseball history.