|
PECATONICA BASE BALL CLUB
The Pecatonica
(Illinois) Base Ball Club had a very brief existence and lost by a lopsided
margin in the only one of its games that has been recorded for posterity. Yet
the club remained alive in the popular imagination long after playing its last
game. As is so often the case, the myths and legends that surrounded this club
have only a limited basis in reality.
In 1866, the city of
Rockford, Illinois, hosted a major tournament that was billed as being for the
championship of the Northwest. The event attracted the likes of the Cream City
club of Milwaukee, the Julien club of Dubuque, Iowa, the Detroit Base Ball Club,
the Excelsior Club of Chicago, the Forest Citys of Rockford, and a number of
other strong Illinois teams. But the entrants also included one representing
Pecatonica, a small village about twenty miles from Rockford, that had only been
formed four months earlier. (Chicago Tribune, June 29, 1866)
Their participation created a problem. Tournaments of the era were almost
always broken into several divisions, to allow junior and small-town clubs to
compete among their peers. But when the captains met at the outset of the
tournament, a proposal to create different classes was voted down, forcing the
Pecatonica Base Ball Club to either play against the big-city teams or not
compete. (Detroit Advertiser and Tribune, July 3, 1866) The Pecatonica
Club decided to play and became the tenth entry in the field.
The small-town
upstarts were pitted against one of the tournaments favorites in the opening
game of the single-elimination tournament and the results were predictable. The
Detroit Base Ball Club beat the Pecatonica Club by the score of 49-1.
While the lopsided
result was completely predictable, a couple of factors made the game memorable.
The first was the fact that the Pecatonicas had managed only a single run at a
time when scores were almost always in double digits. The club’s lack of
success at the bat was attributed to “the wind being directly in the face of the
batting, making it comparatively rare occurrence to knock the ball very far from
the bases.” (Chicago Tribune, June 29, 1866) Nonetheless, the 49-1
margin attracted widespread attention, with the Chicago Times describing
it as “a victory … only to be equaled by the Athletics of Philadelphia.”
The second was that the tournament organizers had arranged to have numerous
prizes awarded to both the clubs and to individual players. One of these
prizes, the “Chandlers and Humphrey Prize,” was a silver-mounted tin horn
bearing the inscription “Practice” that would go to the club that was beaten by
the greatest margin. (Chicago Tribune, June 25, 1866) Naturally the
Pecatonica Base Ball Club was the recipient of the horn, which was described as
“an ornate specimen of German silver workmanship.” (Ball Players’ Chronicle,
August 15, 1869)
At the conclusion of
the tournament, which was won the Excelsiors of Chicago, the Pecatonica Club
returned home and there is no record that they ever played another game. The
next year the mighty Nationals of Washington came to Chicago to play a series
against the top clubs in Illinois. To everyone’s surprise, the Nationals were
beaten in the first game by the Forest Citys of Rockford. In the next match,
the Eastern visitors faced the Excelsiors of Chicago, and since the Excelsiors
were the state’s number one club it was now assumed in Chicago that the
Excelsiors would win.
Instead the
Nationals beat Chicago’s pride and joy by the shocking margin of 49-4. The loss
ended any hope that the Excelsiors would become a national powerhouse. It also
reminded many people of the game at the Rockford tournament that had ended with
a very similar score. The similarity was also noticed in Pecatonica, and
shortly thereafter the Excelsior Club received a package from that village. It
contained the horn they had received at the Rockford tournament along with a
good-natured note that commending the Chicago club for having "fairly taken from
us our hard-earned laurels." (Chicago Tribune, July 31, 1867)
The Excelsiors seem
to have taken the tin horn in good humor, and some of their supporters brought
it along to Detroit and blew it throughout a match against the vanquishers of
the Pecatonica Base Ball Club. As a result, the horn – now universally known as
the “Pecatonica horn” – passed into baseball lore.
The lopsided score
of the Pecatonica Club’s only known game was one aspect of the appeal, and many
of the references invoked the idea of a hopelessly overmatched club. This was
especially noticeable in Chicago, where the ensuing years brought periodic
reminders of the club. For example, in 1878, after the White Stockings coughed
up a 7-2 lead, a Tribune sportswriter described the lead as one “that
ought to have enabled even the Pecatonica Horn-blowers to win if they played
even fairly steadily.” (Chicago Tribune, May 27, 1878)
But memories of the
Pecatonica club also remained alive in other quarters, and in these
reminiscences it was the club’s rural origins that were emphasized. The most
notable was a widely reprinted 1878 description of the game that was presumably
made up. This account described a Pecatonica farmer who made the trip to
Rockford for the game and wagered three loads of hay and a yearling calf on its
outcome. At the outset of the game, he keeps track of the score by making
notches in a stick with his knife. But with all the scoring on one side, he
gradually becomes disheartened. Finally, an explanation occurs to him and he
exclaims, "Why the goldarned fools are after the horn!" (The piece appeared in
the New York Sunday Mercury on October 12, 1878. It also appeared in the
New York World and other newspapers.)
The enduring appeal
of this image of a plucky rural nine that suffers an overwhelming defeat was
shown in 1914 when Finley Peter Dunne, the popular columnist who created Mr.
Dooley, included a mention. In the column, an old-timer reminisced in an
exaggeratedly rural dialect about having watched Harry Wright, Cap Anson, Jim
White and “th’ Forest Citys bate th’ Pecatonica Blues be a scoor iv two hundhred
an’ eight to nawthin.’” (Syndicated column; Boston Globe, March 8, 1914)
Legends such as
these were kept alive and expanded upon in the oral story-telling tradition of
nineteenth-century America. The resulting tales were very tall. For example,
an 1887 article maintained that the Pecatonica Club themselves donated the horn,
expecting to finish last and win it, only to have the Excelsiors finish last. (Chicago
Inter-Ocean, August 10, 1887) And in 1896, as part of an article about the
stories being told about early baseball, the New York Times reported as
follows:
“The most famous of these annals is that of the ‘Pecatonica Horn,’ or rather, of
the great tournament of 1869, devised and carried out by ‘Uncle Hi’ Waldo, and
which gave rise to the horn and the story. At this tournament there were
gathered as guests of the Forest Citys the Mutuals of New York, the Atlantics of
Brooklyn, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, and such local clubs as the Maple Leafs
of Guilford, the Ducklegs of Belvidere, the Rustlers of Cherry Valley, the
Plowboys of Stillman Valley, and the Pecatonicas of Pecatonica. It fell to the
lot of ‘Uncle Hi’ Waldo to provide the prizes and trophies to be played for, and
when he thought he had done the thing up handsomely and was all through, the
Hon. ‘Bob’ Tinker, a famous joker and afterward Mayor of the town, remarked:
“ ‘Why, Uncle Hi,
you have forgotten a prize for the club having the lowest score.’
“ ‘That’s so,’ said
‘Uncle Hi.’ ‘Well, what is suitable for the club coming out at the small end of
the horn? I have it. We’ll give ’em a horn.’ And forthwith he ordered
constructed the largest tin horn ever made. The last day of the tournament was
the one on which the Pecatonicas of Pecatonica were to play the Red Stockings,
and as it was generally conceded that they would win the horn, it was taken to
the Fair Grounds on a float, with great ceremony, and during the game, rousing
blasts were blown upon it by enthusiasts to encourage the Pecatonicas to
sustained effort.
“When the
Pecatonicas came on the field a young farmer was conspicuously in evidence close
to the umpire and scorers. He had a lath, whittled down to a fine edge on both
sides, ready to notch in keeping tally. The game started, and developed into
one long inning, which lasted all through the afternoon, and the Pecatonicas of
Pecatonica were sweating, shouting, and running breathlessly all over the field
during the long and phenomenal inning of the Red Stockings. The Pecatonica
enthusiast had started out by betting a yearling calf on his home favorites, and
later on added a load of hay and another of wood to his wager. Just as dusk was
falling that stalwart batter George Wright swiped the ball a fair stroke, and
sent it over the centrefield fence into Kent’s Creek, and it floated away on the
current, while four runs in succession came in, the score then standing
something like 121 to 0.
“The young farmer
carefully notched up the four runs on his lath, which was already full of the
nicks on one side, and, as he was obliged to turn over the end to the other
side, he rubbed his hand carefully over the notches, and then, looking up in
surprise and astonishment, he gazed upon the laughing bystanders with a dawning
expression upon his face of the calamitous fate that had overtaken the
Pecatonicas and burst out with the exclamation, ‘Why, the goll darned fools are
after the horn!’
“Thus started the
story of the famous Pecatonica horn, which in various forms has found place in
baseball annals ever since. The Red Stockings begged the horn from the
Pecatonicas and carried it in triumph throughout the country, exhibiting it with
pride as a trophy of their famous victory and of the greatest baseball
tournament ever held in the West.”(New York Times, April 12, 1896)
While accounts such
as this one bore little relation to the actual events of the 1866 Rockford
tournament, they did serve to keep memories of the Pecatonica Base Ball Club
alive long after the club’s very short career had ended.
CLUB MEMBERS
Although later
accounts implied that the members of the Pecatonica Base Ball Club were rural
hayseeds, the reality was very different. Pecatonica remains to this day a
small village of about 2,000 and it was slightly smaller at the time – the 1860
census shows a little over 800 residents, a figure that had grown to about 1,800
by 1870. The town’s population in 1860 included only about 80 males who would
have been in their twenties as of 1866 when the Pecatonica Base Ball Club was
formed, and that number had only risen to 120 as of 1870.
There was thus an
extremely small population from which to select a baseball nine, and the pool of
available players was reduced by several other factors. To begin with, the
Civil War had taken the lives of many young men who would have been of ideal age
to play baseball in 1866, while leaving many others unfit for baseball
activity. Other young men couldn’t join a baseball club because of business or
family obligations or just weren’t interested. Of course the club could have
drawn on the surrounding farm population, but it was a daunting task to get
farmer’s sons into town on a regular basis for practice.
As a result, it can
safely be assumed that the Pecatonica Club had few members beyond its first nine
and that those nine represented every able-bodied local man who was willing to
practice, whether or not they possessed much athletic ability. A closer look at
those nine men follows, and it produces some surprising results. In particular,
none of the nine were farmers, while many of them would eventually move to large
cities and engage in the law, business or medicine. Several of the men were
well into their thirties, which again suggests how difficult it was for a
village as small as Pecatonica to field a baseball nine.
Another striking
feature is that two of the club members had attended the University of Michigan,
with one playing on that school’s highly successful baseball nine, a squad that
would beat the Detroit Base Ball Club in 1867. It seems likely that these two
young men were responsible for organizing the Pecatonica Base Ball Club. Yet
this intriguing element of the club was never mentioned, with reports instead
exaggerating the club’s rural ties.
John Comly Bigger:
J. C. Bigger was born in Massillon, Ohio, on April 11, 1844, and his family
eventually moved to Freeport, Illinois, a town some 17 miles from Pecatonica.
He enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1862, but put his studies on hold
that summer to enlist in the Union Army. He served in Illinois’s 92nd
Infantry Regiment for sixteen months, earning his discharge on December 29,
1863. He then returned to school, earning a law degree and playing the outfield
for the school baseball nine in 1866. Bigger was also a member of the same
fraternity as Henry B. Farwell, so it is probably no coincidence that both ended
up in Pecatonica in 1867 when the club’s first baseball nine was formed. He was
the left fielder for the nine, and scored their lone run in their 49-1 loss at
the Rockford tournament. Bigger earned his degree in 1868 and by 1870, he had
moved to St. Louis to begin a law practice. During the 1870s, he moved to
Dallas, where he became a U. S. Attorney and was active in Republican Party. He
died in Dallas on September 24, 1900.
Dr.
Thomas Mifflin Butler: Born in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, on June 21, 1833,
Dr. Thomas M. Butler graduated from Lewisburg University and then earned a
medical degree from Cincinnati Medical College. He arrived in Pecatonica in
1861 to begin a medical practice and married a local woman three years later.
In 1876 he took a break from medicine when he was elected circuit clerk. He
eventually returned to medicine, practicing in Milwaukee, Detroit and Rockford
before retiring around 1903. The onetime first baseman and clean-up hitter for
the Pecatonica Base Ball Club died in Rockford on November 28, 1912.
Henry Byron Farwell:
Henry Byron Farwell was born on October 1, 1845, on a farm near Freeport. He
graduated form Freeport High School and then in 1862 Henry enrolled at the
University of Michigan, where he belonged to the same fraternity as John Comly
Bigger. Around this time, his family moved to Pecatonica and Bigger and Farwell
both became members of the Pecatonica Base Ball Club in 1867, with Farwell
serving as the club’s pitcher. Farwell never graduated from the University of
Michigan, but passed the bar exam and began a law practice in Rockford. He
later moved to St. Paul, where he served as a police court judge for a few years
before returning to private practice. He died in St. Paul on April 20, 1903.
Charles C. Stevens:
C. C. Stevens was the first baseman of the Pecatonica Base Ball Club. He also
served as club secretary, and in 1867 he had the responsibility of sending the
famed horn to the Excelsior Club and of writing the accompanying letter.
Charles C. Stevens was born in Cuba, New York, on November 6, 1832. Since his
father was born in the same New York town as fellow club members Erastus and
Thomas Stevens, it seems very likely that he was their first cousin. Stevens
got married in 1854 and moved to Pecatonica the following year to work as a
master saddler. After training his son Frank in the same profession, he sold
his business to his son in 1883, and then worked in real estate and loans and
collections. He also served as a notary public and was Village President when
he died in Pecatonica on December 30, 1902.
Erastus Corning
Stevens: Erastus Stevens was born in Illinois on March 27, 1837. His father
Josiah had taken the family to Illinois from New York by covered wagon three
years earlier, and Josiah found work for the railroad. As a result, the family
moved several times, and there are conflicting accounts of the exact location of
Erastus’s birth. Eventually the family settled in Pecatonica, where Erastus
became a carpenter. He was married and had a young daughter when the Civil War
broke out, but nonetheless enlisted in the 1st Illinois Cavalry and
served for fifteen months. While at war, his first son was born and he learned
the news when a letter arrived from home that included a little blond curl off
the infant’s head and a request that he suggest a name. He chose Josiah Halleck
in honor of, respectively, his father and the General under whom he was
serving. After returning from the war and having a brief tenure as third
baseman for the Pecatonica Base Ball Club, Erastus Stevens did not remain in the
town for long. Around 1868 he relocated to Chicago and worked as a carpenter
and builder. After about a decade in Chicago, he and his wife and four children
moved to the Dakota Territories during the Great Dakota Boom. Their first
winter was a discouraging one that featured a noted blizzard but the family
persevered and eventually settled in Chamberlain, South Dakota, where Erastus
Stevens’s building skills proved invaluable. Along with his son and brother
Thomas, he built most of the town’s houses along with the Indian School and
numerous other important buildings. Stevens then opened a meat market in
Chamberlain, which he ran until 1895 when he moved to Vermillion. He died there
on May 22, 1903.
Thomas Asaph
Stevens: Thomas Asaph Stevens was the younger brother of Erastus Stevens and the
catcher of the Pecatonica Base Ball Club. He was born in Elgin, Illinois, on
January 26, 1840. On the day after President Lincoln’s first call for
volunteers, he enlisted in the Union Army as a member of the Rockford Zouaves.
When his three-month enlistment ended, he helped recruit a company in the First
Illinois Cavalry, then served as a first lieutenant in that company alongside
his brother for over a year. He eventually enlisted for a third tour of duty in
the 146th Illinois Infantry, finally being mustered out on August 1,
1865. He returned to Pecatonica and got married later that month. Thomas
Stevens opened a meat market in town, but was soon itching for new
surroundings. He caught “gold fever” and spent time staking claims and
prospecting in several Western states but always returned to Pecatonica. In
1872, he finally left for good, moving to Chicago and working there as a
bookkeeper for a decade. After his brother relocated to Chamberlain, Thomas
followed him in 1882 and helped him build many of the town’s homes and
buildings. He then served as register of deeds and held several other prominent
positions in Chamberlain, culminating in 1898 with his appointment as local
postmaster. He died in Chamberlain on March 15, 1917.
Daniel A.
Stitsel: D. A. Stitsel was born around 1828 in Pennsylvania, making him nearly
40 and the oldest club member when he played right field for the Pecatonica Base
Ball Club. He arrived in Pecatonica in 1854 and married his landlady’s daughter
six years later. He became a hardware and iron merchant and aside from briefly
relocating to Chicago, lived in Pecatonica for the rest of his life. The 1900
census shows him as retired and he died in 1905.
Andrew M. Thompson:
A. M. Thompson was the centerfielder of the Pecatonica Base Ball Club and the
only club member to again become involved with baseball after the Rockford
tournament. Thompson was born on November 9, 1845, in Seward Township near
Pecatonica. By 1860, the family had moved into Pecatonica and, according to his
obituary, Andrew served as a drummer boy in the Civil War. After the war, he
worked for a while as a saloon keeper, then got married in 1875 and moved to St.
Paul, Minnesota, where he became involved in real estate. In 1884, he also
became involved in the affairs of the local minor league club, eventually
becoming its manager. Late in the year, St. Paul joined the Union Association,
making Thompson briefly a major league manager. He continued to be involved in
the local baseball scene for several more years, managing a club in 1886 and
subsequently purchasing an interest in it. In 1889, Thompson even mortgaged his
house to keep professional baseball in St. Paul alive, only to see the club have
to disband the following year. But apparently he came out of the experience
solvent and undiscovered, as two years later he purchased a stake in another
local minor league club. Andrew M. Thompson died in Pecatonica on February 17,
1895, as the result of a sleigh accident while hauling wood.
E. J. Thompson: E.
J. Thompson is the only club member whose identity remains in any doubt but he
is almost certainly one of Andrew Thompson’s uncles. The most likely candidate
is Edward J. Thompson, who was born in 1836 in Ohio, served in the Civil War,
and died in 1873. But Edward had a twin brother named Edwin who died in 1875
and it is possible that Edwin was the man who played center field for the
Pecatonica Base Ball Club. Edwin’s middle initial is not listed on any official
documents.
|
