It Began at Cooper's Star Billiards Saloon (March 19, 1867)

Knoxville Whig, March 20, 1867

It had been 11 days since the Great Freshet of 1867 struck Knoxville and while the Holston's floodwaters had begun to recede, most of Knoxville was left in a heap of debris and mud. As business came to a standstill, a number of young aspiring professionals began to talk about the possibility of organizing a base ball club. Sam B. Dow compiled a list of nearly sixty men that he thought might be interested in starting a base ball team. Most of the names on Dow’s list were close acquaintances who, like him, had either served in the Union army or were members of one of Knoxville’s masonic lodges. But there were also a handful of names that had served in the Confederate ranks or belonged to Rebel-sympathizing families during the war. Dow put out a call for all interested parties to meet March 19 at Joseph Lewis Cooper’s Star Billiard Saloon, which was located on the first floor of Ramsey’s Hall on the east side of Gay Street between Cumberland and Church Streets.

Knoxville City Directory, 1869

Closeup view of Gay Street ca. 1866-67 with signage for Star Billiards located underneath
the sign of T.M. Schleier's Picture Gallery and to the right of the sign "F. Heart" & Bros.

What followed from that evening’s meeting was the city’s first base ball club, the Knoxville Knoxvilles. At an average age of twenty-five and thirteen of whom had served in the Civil War (ten were officers), Dow’s club constituted professionals on the rise who had traded their military uniforms for civilian clothes. While most of these men were veterans who hailed from Midwestern states such as Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan, not all were. Among them were sons of prominent East Tennessee Unionists, two of whom were brothers from President Andrew Johnson’s adopted hometown of Greeneville. The outlier on Dow’s Knoxville roster was John Walker Paxton, a Rebel doctor who organized and briefly served as the captain of the "Knoxville Grays," Company E of the 19th TN Infantry. The explanation for Paxton’s inclusion on the Knoxvilles could be attributed to the fact that he was a fellow Mason in Dow's lodge.
 
Cooper’s Star Billiards became not only the regular site for the Knoxvilles’ club meetings and even pre- and post-match frivolities, but also hosted their rivals, the Holston Base Ball Club. The Holstons were comprised of a number of the “southern boys” from Dow’s original list of names that had not shown up during that first March 19 meeting. Much like the players for the Knoxvilles, these young professionals craved social camaraderie and athletic competition. The Holstons, however, were generally younger than the Knoxvilles (average age of 22) and only included four Civil War veterans, two of whom fought for the Union and two in the Rebel ranks. Knoxville Mayor James C. Luttrell’s two sons—James (a Rebel 1^st Lt.) and Samuel (a Union Corporal)—played for the Holstons. Despite the balance between Union and Rebel veterans on the club’s roster, the Holstons’ political sympathies were marked by Tennessee’s Reconstruction era as they constituted the Conservative (former wartime Unionists) and Democratic opposition to the Republican Governor William Brownlow’s administration (Gov. Brownlow and several leading local Republicans would be elected honorary members of the Knoxvilles).
 
Newspapers helped promote the game of baseball because baseball news sold papers and thus competing newspapers in most cities marketed themselves as the baseball paper. In Knoxville, both John Fleming’s Free Press and William J. Ramage’s Herald vied for that honor. That contest was settled quickly when the two rival editors became partners with Ramage as the manager and Fleming as senior editor of the Daily Press and Herald. As Holston partisans, their paper reported on the coming and goings of the Holstons. Moreover, due to their press being located adjacent to Cooper’s billiards saloon, they had a direct pipeline into the club’s meetings.
 
There is little in the historical record to help us develop anything but a brief snapshot into the life and times of Star Billiards’ proprietor, Joseph Lewis Cooper. Cooper was born on May 12, 1835 in the state of New York where his parents were also born. Considering the number of Joseph Coopers, it is impossible to determine with any degree of certainty the identities of his parents. It is also unclear as to when Cooper arrived in Knoxville; however, he probably did so at some point following the Union army’s liberation of the city from Rebel control in the fall of 1863. By 1865, Cooper had proposed marriage to Nancy Kelso Hudiburg, the daughter of farmer and merchant Albert Smith and Leanah Young Hudiburg. The couple were married on March 14, 1865 and together they had six children (three daughters and two sons—the 1910 Census indicates that the couple had a sixth child but that it was deceased by that time). Shortly after his marriage to Nancy, Cooper entered into a partnership with his father-in-law in a dry goods firm that was located at the corner of what is currently Market Square and Union. By 1867, however, Cooper had decided to open a restaurant with a billiards saloon, a trade that he continued for nearly a quarter of century until his death on August 11, 1894 at the age of fifty-nine.
 
As Knoxvillians and people across the South became afflicted with what was known as the “base ball fever” in 1867, Cooper caught the bug too. As the Holstons went on an impressive run of victories in the summer of 1867 that culminated in the Tennessee state championship, Cooper began selling Holston Base Ball Club branded cigars packaged in a special edition box that featured Knoxville Mayor James C. Luttrell with a huge bat in hand striking a home run that went whizzing over Pendleton Shropshire’s house toward First Creek, thus allowing three baserunners and Luttrell included to score.

Knoxville Daily Free Press (August 23, 1867)

 Today’s Knoxville Holston Vintage Base Ball Club honors the national game that was first played in Knoxville in May 1867. Those first games were played on the Gay Street Base Ball Grounds, the lot of land now occupied by businesses along the east side of the 300 and 400 blocks of Gay Street. Much like the men who met at Star Billiards on March 19, 1867, seven prospective vintage baseballists gathered at Downtown Grill and Brewery on the evening of December 11, 2013, at about the very spot that home plate sat on the Gay Street Base Ball Grounds, to formerly toast and commence the organization of the Knoxville Holston VBBC. Within five months of that meeting, the Holston VBBC would begin playing on the club’s home grounds, the Historic Ramsey House, the home of a prominent East Tennessee family’s whose name was on the building (Ramsey Hall) in which Joseph L. Cooper opened his restaurant and Star Billiards and saloon in 1867 during the inaugural season of baseball in Knoxville.   

Knoxville Vintage Base Ball Club Meeting, Dec. 11, 2013

Sources: Joseph L. Cooper (1860 Census for Nancy Kelso Hudiburg; Joseph & Nancy Cooper 1870 & 1880 Census; Joseph Cooper Obituary, Knoxville Tribune, Aug. 13, 1894) 

 

Joseph Lewis Cooper Grave, Old Gray Cemetery