NEW YORK MAGNOLIA BALL CLUB-Vive la Knickerbocker.-A meeting of members of above club will take place this (Thursday) afternoon, 2nd instant, at Elysian Fields, Hoboken [N.J.]. It is earnestly requested that every member will be present, willing eager to do his duty. Play will commence precisely as one o'clock. at 4 o'clock.1Among organized groups that played baseball before Knickerbockers were Gotham, New York, Eagle, Brooklyn, Olympic, Magnolia clubs. The last named came into view only recently, as a ball club composed not of white-collar sorts with shorter workdays gentlemanly airs but sporting-life characters, from ward heelers to billiard-room operators bigamists. Why did game's earliest writers forget to include this club in its histories? One might venture to guess that Magnolias were too unseemly a bunch to have been covered by a fig leaf, so they were simply written out of Genesis story.In 2007, rummaging through classified advertisement section of New York Herald of November 2, 1843, looking for who knows what, I was astonished to find a notice for a baseball club unrecorded in annals of game. Moreover, notice made clear that this city-based club played its games across North River at Elysian Fields, almost two full years before formation of pioneer Knickerbockers their lease of playing grounds at Hoboken. That diminutive ad, which also ran in New York Sun, read in full:NEW YORK MAGNOLIA BALL CLUB-Vive la Knickerbocker.-A meeting of members of above club will take place this (Thursday) afternoon, 2nd instant, at Elysian Fields, Hoboken. It is earnestly requested that every member will be present, willing eager to do his duty. Play will commence precisely at one o'clock. at 4 o'clock.JOHN McKIBBIN, Jr., President. JOSEPH CARLISLE, Vice President ANDREW LESTER, Sec. n2 1t*mThe coding at bottom signaled that ad was to appear one time only (1t), with that occasion being game day, November 2 (n2). While this may strike modern eyes as a late month for a baseball game, baseball season of this era typically ran to very end of November, in part because August, with its fevers contagions, was regarded as unsuitable for exertion. The mention of chowder signaled almost sacramental union of those assembled, their like minds symbolized by their partaking of food from a single pot. The chowder was a fixture of political rallies, too; city's first target company (archery or rifle), arising from butcher stalls at west-side Washington Market, was Washington Market Club of 1818. Chowder was national soup, wrote Herbert Asbury, and in those times chowder was to be more eaten than drunk, for it was not anaemic liquid which now sloshes so despairingly in restaurant bowls, but a thick substantial mixture, compounded of eels, fish, clams, lobster, chicken, duck, all kinds of tempting ingredients. No social function was complete without a great dish of chowder....2Of officers named in ad, Irish-born president, 29-year-old John McKibbin, Jr., was a U.S. inspector-a patronage position perhaps obtained through good offices of his father, who in an aldermanic stroke of fortune in 1835 had been named city's first Superintendent of Pavements. Seven years after calling Magnolia Ball Club to muster chowder, younger McKibbin found himself a resident of Sing Sing, convicted of bigamy.3The vice president actual leader of club, Joseph Carlisle, was 26-yearold proprietor of Magnolia Lunch Saloon at 74 Chambers Street, corner of Broadway, offering the best of Wines, Liquors, Segars, every other requisite. Why was this northern eatery named for a flower symbolic of South? Perhaps to signal to sporting crowd that this was a full-service house of sort pleasing to Southerners in New York on business, to gamblers who leftNew Orleans after it banned gambling in 1835. …
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Oct 1, 2022
J T Murphy 
Open Access