Sam B. Dow, the Problem of Historical Memory, and the Origins of Knoxville Baseball (Part 1)

Where does one begin when writing the history of the origins of baseball in Knoxville, Tennessee? In a city in which football is king, there has been little ink spilled on Knoxville’s rich baseball history. In fact, for all the greatness of the Tennessee Volunteers football, a team that ranks just outside the Top 10 in all time wins, eighth in bowl victories, and two national championships (1951 & 1998), a number of Knoxville baseball teams have won state, regional, and league championships. Of course, many of these championships were achieved prior to the rise of Tennessee football under Coach General Robert Neyland. 

For those seeking the roots of Knoxville’s baseball history, one might reasonably begin their search in the newspapers. Until recently, that required a visit to a local library, either Knox County’s Calvin C. McClung Collection inside the East Tennessee History Center or the University of Tennessee’s Special Collections Library, or even the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville to begin sifting through various reels of microfilm. Today's researcher need only a computer and a subscription to Newspapers.com to unlock thousands and thousands of digitized pages of various Knoxville and other Tennessee newspapers. 

Ron Allen, Knoxville & Baseball Historian

Ronald R. Allan, Sr. 

For early Knoxville baseball history, one must reckon with the work of the late Ronald R. Allen, Sr., an insurance salesman who worked for some 40 years with J.E. Lutz & Co. and spent his retirement as a rare book dealer and local historian scouring Knoxville newspapers to produce some 30 books on a variety of local topics. One of those books was “’Same Old Smokies’: A Brief History of Baseball in Knoxville, Tennessee, 1865-1954.” Though Allen set 1865 as the starting point for his history of Knoxville baseball, which was essentially a compilation of newspaper articles that formed his narrative, he was cautious to note that his careful reading of Knoxville newspapers did not yield any articles or reports of baseball games played in the city for the years 1865 and 1866. In fact, it was not until 1867 that Allen discovered the first newspaper report of baseball being organized and played in Knoxville.

Sam B. Dow & the Origins of Knoxville Baseball

If this was the case, then why did Allen date his history of baseball in Knoxville beginning in 1865? The explanation lies in a newspaper article that appeared in the November 20, 1921 issue of the Knoxville Sentinel in which Samuel (Sam) Billings Dow, a retired Knoxville businessman at the age of 81 at the time, claimed to have organized the first baseball club—the Knoxville Knoxvilles—in the South in 1865. The article quoted Dow at length, as he reminisced about games and even specific plays that had occurred more than 50 years before. According to Dow, not only had he organized the first baseball club in the South, but also his club was comprised of northern boys who had served in the Union army. He added, that a rival club—the Holston Club of Knoxville—soon formed that was made up of southern Rebels. Although Dow did not specify whether this rival club consisted of former Confederate soldiers or Rebel sympathizers, both of which could be found in large numbers in Civil War era Knoxville, a city whose political sympathies were nearly evenly split during the war, the inference could be made that Civil War divisions lingered in Knoxville on its post-Civil War ballfields. Moreover, Dow’s account included the steps he had to take to acquire land along the east side of Gay Street (present-day 300 & 400 blocks of Gay) just to play “base ball.” Most interesting about Dow’s recollections are that in spite of the passage of time, he had vivid memories of individual games, even individual plays and injuries that occurred, many of which happened all in that first match between Dow’s Knoxvilles and their rivals, the Holstons. And finally, Dow included his own moments of glory in both the field and at the bat. Dow claimed that it was not an uncommon sight to witness several home runs during those early games played on open, uneven fields that did not include a fence in the outfield. Dow added that he “always made two or three home runs in a game.”   

Knoxville Sentinel, Nov. 20, 1921

The 1921 article has long since been clipped, preserved, and available to anyone interested in writing about Knoxville baseball in a folder marked “baseball,” situated among various topics in Knoxville History in the vertical files on the third floor of the McClung Collection. While Ron Allen was careful to note that his review of Knoxville newspapers revealed some inconsistencies in Dow’s account and scores of baseball and local historians have long since confirmed that baseball was being played throughout the South prior to the American Civil War, an article entitled, "Tear It Up Boys," published in the May 22, 1997 issue of the Metro Pulse, an alternative Knoxville newspaper that was published weekly between 1991 and 2014, took much of Dow’s account for granted (with the notable exception of Dow’s claim that he founded the first baseball team in the South). Consequently, some still point to 1865 as the historical date for the origins of Knoxville baseball.

Should we take the reminiscences of an 81-year-old Sam B. Dow recounting events that occurred some 50+ years prior at face value? Of course, the only way to answer this question is to take a deep dive into the historical record. And this means that in addition to exploring various Knoxville newspapers, both on microfilm and utilizing digitized records that can be searched thanks to Optical Character Recognition (OCR), even in spite of its limitations, one will need to think outside the box and use various sources such as census and military records, city directories, obituaries, warranty deeds, cemetery records (and visits to eyeball markers, which excites this taphophile!), various manuscript collections, etc., etc. In some cases, one might need some luck, like finding a descendant of Sam Dow who has a stack of pictures of Dow (including a carte-de-visite of one of Dow's closest friends and a Knoxville Knoxvilles player who personally signed his the front of his CDV thus giving me his real name that the newspapers butchered), a stash of letters, and even a diary that belonged to Dow. But first, before we plunge into the sources, it would be instructive to consider the relationship between human memory and historical reality to better understand the complexities of human memory and its relationship to historical documentation.

The Problem of Historical Memory

Experts in human psychiatry and psychoanalysis have long argued that memory can rarely be depended upon as a faithful account of past events, especially in cases in which the subject recounting the event directly participated. Humans tend to remember past events unreliably and their recollections of the past changes over the course of their lives. Due to any number of processes, one’s perceptions and memories can become distorted over time. This may be due to a function of a need to protect oneself from either the emotional consequences of what happened during a particular event (series of events) or a desire to preserve one’s self-esteem. As such, historical reality becomes modified. Perhaps one tells it not like it was, but rather how they want it to be. As people age and suffer from the loss of brain cells, there is impairment of short-term memory, of immediate recall of recently learned information. And though one's long-term memory may not be as greatly impaired as their short-term memory, their recollections of past events may well still be distorted due to their advanced age. Therefore, when someone reminiscences incorrectly about a past event or events, they are, in effect, engaging in a subtle revisionism, a rewriting of history that distorts historical reality. Scholars who have studied reminiscence data from older-aged populations, such as Virginia Revere and Sheldon Torbin, have concluded that elderly people have a need to see the past in such a way as to achieve some measure of immortality, to see oneself as a hero of a life worth remembering. Such aged peoples recast their memories to make themselves uniquely vivid within the event or series of events being recounted. The central theme is clear—human memories may not be completely trustworthy and, it is quite possible, that one’s recollections may be more wishful thinking than true reality.

Seeking Truth

The professional historian seeks objectivity in the assessment of historical materials and they are trained to draw only appropriate inferences from those materials. And that is what I have done in the course of my research on the origins of Knoxville baseball. Before I dig any deeper into my own research to determine the validity of Dow’s account, I must acknowledge two historians—Adam H. Alfrey and Mark D. Aubrey—who happen to both be good friends that I am greatly indebted to for my own work.

Adam Alfrey hooked me in the summer of 2013 to play vintage base ball, even if he only wanted me to be an arbiter (umpire) for the Tennessee Association of Vintage Base Ball. Alfrey was putting together a club that he was going to call the Knoxville Holstons, after the Holston Club of Knoxville. It turns out that he had done some baseball research of his own, sifting through various Knoxville newspapers and, I suspect, the work of Ron Allen. Alfrey produced a 7-pg. document containing various primary sources and notes that he had collected about Knoxville’s earliest baseball clubs, as well as some information about a club (the Dry Town Boys) that had existed in the early 1890s in Harriman, Tennessee. Alfrey was quick to note inconsistencies in Sam B. Dow’s 1921 account with what he had found and hypothesized that Dow had confused 1865 for 1867. He pointed to several stories contained within the 1921 article that Dow attributed to the first baseball game played in Knoxville and, for that matter, the South, that he found in several articles over the course of 1867. Moreover, Alfrey pointed me to another, unusual source, found during his scan of Knoxville newspapers that would lead to the discovery of a number of Knoxville’s early baseballists. That source was a listing of Knoxville bachelors that ran in two consecutive issues (Dec. 6-7, 1867) of the Knoxville Daily Herald. Within this list of eligible suitors, were a number of men who were identified by their first and last names, including their ages, as well as a brief, colorful description of their appearance, character, and, for some, a reference to their abilities in the field and at the dish. This source alone enabled me to confirm the identifications of several baseballists who were only listed by their last name in box scores (some descriptions included incorrect ages while baseball references are influenced by the editor's preference for the Holstons—note the not-so-subtle jab at Dow's expense regarding his abiltites as a player for the Knoxvilles).

Bachelor description for Samuel Billings Dow, Knoxville Daily Herald (Dec. 6, 1867)

Mark Aubrey, in many respects, is not only a great researcher, he is a good friend who has served as my spiritual guru and an overworked, unpaid research assistant. He deserves to be acknowledged in anything I produce that is related to baseball or Knoxville’s Million Dollar Fire (if that book ever gets finished!). To this present day, he continues to answer any questions that I may have and shares interesting finds of his own and those that relate to my work. I have relied countless times on his research that he posts on his various blogs, such as “Old Knoxville Base Ball,” or via his own personal social media accounts. More often than not, his “clipping” of articles on newspapers.com have made it much easier to find a story on a topic of interest. Like Alfrey, Aubrey realized some time ago that though Dow had pinpointed 1865 as the year in which he founded the first baseball team in the South, that the historical record simply did not—it could not—corroborate Dow’s memory.

A thorough exploration of the historical newspaper record while researching for my article, “‘A Perfect Mania’: The Origins of Base Ball in Knoxville, Tennessee,” led me to the discovery of yet another origins story, one that predated the 1921 Sentinel article by nearly 25 years and, so far as I know, has never been cited in any published history of Knoxville baseball. This particular article, which has some similarities to the 1921 article that I will examine in Part 2, can help us further assess the historical accuracy of Dow’s 1921 reminiscences.  

For the full Nov. 20, 1921 Knoxville Sentinel article, click on the following image below (if you have a newspapers.com subscription, you can link here https://www.newspapers.com/clip/36316294/1922-early-baseball-in-knoxville/):