Cogswell's Bat

Abstract

In 1796, on spring day in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Joseph Green Cogswell, then nine years old, took skates and his bat to play. Uncertain which to use, he leaned over from wharf to try the strength of the ice with his bat,1 whereupon he fell into the Essex River. Rescued and resuscitated, Cogswell went on to lead life rich in accomplishment. One accomplishment, in 1823, was the founding of the Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, famous among physical educators for having boasted the nation's first turnplatz, an outdoor facility for gymnastics. Other evidence, less often cited, suggests that Round Hill encouraged all manner of games and sports, including ball-playing,2 as part of its pioneering educational plan.Decades later, Round Hill alumni John Murray Forbes and George C. Shattuck, Jr., remembered playing at Round Hill: boys were taught to ride, had skating and swimming in their seasons, and wrestling, baseball, and football, wrote Forbes in 1884.3 In 1885 Shattuck Jr. made the same claim.4 As tempting as it is to take Forbes and Shattuck at their word, it is unlikely that they used the term during the 1820s. As with other men looking back over their lives, they used the name of the National Pastime to identify the baseball-like games they had played as schoolboys.By 1834,5 having fallen into debt, Cogswell was forced to close Round Hill. Attempts to sell the property were frustrated for decade more, during which time the buildings fell into disrepair-a fate that the school's papers may have shared. Surviving documents are scattered, and other resources, such as Cogswell's eleven hundred notes,6 cannot be found. Therefore, discussion of Round Hill's connections to baseball must be farranging and circumstantial.Far-ranging may be an understatement: To assess the role of baseball-like games at Round Hill, we must travel to Germany, several years before the school's founding, where Cogswell encountered the physical education pedagogy of Johann Christoph Friedrich Gutsmuths.7 From Germany we travel to China, several years after Round Hill had closed, where alumnus John Murray Forbes taught the officers of the British East India Company how to play ball,8 Round Hill-style.From Germany to MassachusettsIn 1823 Cogswell, together with George Bancroft,9 started the school on Round Hill in Northampton, Massachusetts, some one hundred miles west of Boston. The school opened with 25 boys, ages 9-12, but grew to accommodate almost 150 students per year. Before it closed in 1834, well over 300 boys had studied there.Sons from prominent families attended, and some went on to notable achievement- John Lothrop Motley, historian and diplomat; Philip Kearny, Civil War general; Sam Ward, financier and author; as well as the aforementioned Shattuck, founder of St. Paul's School, and Forbes, China trader and railroad magnate. Famous family names included Amory, Appleton, Channing, Higginson, Lowell, Perkins, Sedgwick, Thorndike, and Van Rensselaer, to name few. For its day the Round Hill School may have been quite progressive, but it was proudly elitist.Round Hill boys studied the standard subjects-Latin and Greek, English composition and elocution, history, moral philosophy, and basic mathematics-though at level well above other schools. Another Round Hill innovation was instruction by native speakers of French, Italian, German, and Spanish. In time, the school offered chemistry, botany, mineralogy, surveying, astronomy, even statistics and theology. Furthermore, in an age when schools for boys focused on intellectual discipline in airless classrooms, Round Hill promoted the Greco-Roman ideal of a sound mind in sound body.10This pagan ideal coexisted comfortably with Christian adage: Idle hands are the devil's tools. Another graduate, George E. Ellis, recalled, boys at Round Hill, with all the rules and provisions for their health, bathing, play, and exercise, were generally of the robuster sort, and full of animal spirits, which sought lively outbursts. …