1825.1 Thurlow Weed and the Growth of Baseball in Rochester, New York

Abstract

Though an industrious, and busy place, its citizens found leisure for rational and healthy recreation. A base-ball club, numbering nearly fifty members, met every afternoon during the ball playing season. Though the members of the club embraced persons between eighteen and forty, it attracted the young and the old. The ball-ground, containing some eight or ten acres, known as Mumford's Meadow, by the side of the river above the falls, is now a compact part of the city.-The Autobiography of Thurlow WeedWhen I first wrote about 19th century Rochester baseball nearly twenty years ago, the 1825 team recalled by local newspaper editor Thurlow Weed was considered proof that Abner Doubleday did not suddenly invent the game in a Cooperstown meadow in 1839. Twenty years later, many more discoveries illuminate the mysteries of the early game. Yet, the evolution of Rochester baseball continues to make important contributions to our knowledge of the early game.Thurlow Weed, who later became a significant 19th-century American politician, mentioned the club in his 1883 autobiography, published one year after his death at 85. Weed listed the club's best players as attorneys Addison Gardner and Frederick Whittelsey, businessmen James K. Livingston, Samuel L. Selden, and Thomas Kempshall, Drs. George Marvin, Frederick Backus, and A.G. Smith, and others.1Urged to seek his fortune here by his friend Addison Gardner, Weed and his wife and family moved to Rochester from the Syracuse area in November 1822. Born in a poor family and largely self-taught, Weed had worked at a wide variety of menial tasks, including his voluntary service in the War of 1812, since the age of eight. More recently his work as a journeyman printer and occasional newspaper editor had enabled him to develop his skills and to make significant friends in a number of New York state communities, including Cooperstown. There, according to baseball historian Randall Brown, Weed worked on a rival newspaper of Ulysses Doubleday, father of Abner.2 He also met his wife, Catherine.Weed's Rochesterville, which quickly became the nation's first inland boomtown after the completion of the Erie Canal one year after his arrival, would have afforded the prosperity and leisure to enable a group of adult men to seek exercise through regular play of a favorite game of their school days. Weed gave no description of the game. But novelist Samuel Hopkins Adams referred to the same club in his 1855 Grandfather Stories, which recounted tales that had captivated him and his four cousins after his family moved to Rochester when he was five years old.3 According to Hopkins Adams, his grandfather Myron Adams, a graduate of Hamilton College and a retired farmer, was a member of the Weed club in 1827. Through his grandfather's reflective comments and criticisms during a Rochester Hop Bitters game, Hopkins Adams included a description of the Weed game.4 Whether Hopkins Adams, age 84 when he wrote Grandfather Tales, actually used a description given by his grandfather and/or received assistance from contemporary baseball historians Will Irwin and Robert Henderson remains unknown.5 Clearly his details resemble those of the varied games of old-fashioned baseball, similar to the Massachusetts game, brought to the Rochester region from New England or the eastern seaboard and played in the War of 1812.6 Hopkins Adams described 12-14 players on a side; a stationary pitcher, catcher, and basemen; mobile outfielders; and outs made by plugging the runner or catching the batted ball.During a July 1955 Cooperstown terrace party, given to honor his recently published book, Hopkins Adams responded to his book's conflict with the Cooperstown origin story by quoting from an 1839 Rochester newspaper account.7Only one mention of Rochester baseball has yet been discovered in Rochester newspapers before May 4, 1857, when the Rochester Union and Advertiser reported that boys were arrested for playing the game and breaking the Sabbath. …