Sam B. Dow, the Problem of Historical Memory, and the Origins of Knoxville Baseball (Part 3)

Samuel B. Dow, ca. 1867

It was July 9, 2020 and the sky was turning a beautiful golden orange as the first rays of light of the morning sun crested over the purple mountainous horizon to the east. After a few months of being bottled up near home base due to the onset of COVID-19, I was racing, eastbound and down Interstate 40 and the sense of excitement that I was feeling was palpable. My adrenaline was flowing to the max. No, I was not about to engage in some kind of "adrenaline-junkie," thrill-seeking adventure activity like skydiving, bungee-jumping, paragliding, etc., etc.—I was about to get my history nerd fixin’ with my first research trip in what felt like was an eternity. My destination lay on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains, in an exclusive part of North Carolina that consisted of lavish lakefront homes and condos owned by many film celebrities and sports personalities, such as Michael Jordan and scores of NASCAR drivers and owners. Kept in the basement of one of these homes were the personal papers, diaries, letters, documents, photographs—a treasure trove—of a few generations of East Tennesseans that played various roles such as merchant prince, educator, lawyer, and county judge among other professions in 19th and 20th century Knoxville. Some of these treasures once belonged to Knoxville’s “Founding Father of Baseball”—Samuel Billings Dow.

I-40 East headed towards the N.C state line

It was a trip long overdue. For years, ever since joining the Knoxville Holstons to play vintage base ball, I had thought about writing a history of Knoxville baseball. Finally, given a nudge to do so, I embarked on the project. But, much like my Knoxville’s Million Dollar Fire book, a number of things—life!—had derailed my progress. Then COVID hit. After two months largely spent inside and visiting local parks, I longed to do something familiar. I reached out to Adam Alfrey, the founding father of our own vintage base ball club. He had done some preliminary research on Knoxville baseball history that he had discovered in the archives in preparation for a talk he gave in April 2014 to help launch the return of Civil War era baseball in East Tennessee. I had recalled him telling me later that some of Dow’s descendants had attended his talk and that one of them told him that they had some of his personal papers. I got the contact information for that descendant and sent him an email. It had been six years, but I kept my fingers crossed that perhaps he still had the same email. I went on with my evening, not expecting to hear anything—if at all—for a few days. But hardly had two hours passed before I received a reply from Dow’s great-grandson with news that he had the family papers at his home and that he would review what he had to see if there might be something of interest for my research in the collection.

The next day came another email, this one from Dow’s own grandson, who, at the age of 96 and Sam B. Dow’s namesake, could recall a few memories of his grandfather and time spent at his grandparent’s West Knoxville home on 10th Avenue. Dow’s grandson shared the moment that he first learned his grandfather had played baseball in Knoxville. It was 1936, eight years following Sam B. Dow’s passing, and his grandmother, Marie, whom the grandchildren called “Grandmimi,” was hosting a family reunion. While various family members read the news and society pages from the Sunday paper, Dow’s grandson picked up the sports section and found an account of a game played long ago between the Knoxvilles and a base ball club from Greeneville. The newspaper article stated the game was played at some point around 1886—that game was actually played in 1869. The story recounted how Dow had hit a homerun in the bottom of the 9th inning to score the winning run. The grandson proudly read the story to his family, which was a sort of a revelation, or so it seemed to him. While most of the grandchildren were likely hearing this story for the first time, Sam’s widow and children no doubt knew of his baseball playing days. It is likely “Grandmimi” and her children remained quiet, enjoying the awe in the eyes of her grandson as a memory of his grandfather was imprinted upon him that day. He subsequently discovered his grandfather’s role in founding baseball in the city after finding the 1921 interview Sam Dow gave the Knoxville Sentinel in 1921 (see Parts 1 & 2). Needless to say, both Dow’s grandson and great-grandson were pleasantly surprised to learn of my research and an invitation was promptly extended to me to come to North Carolina to view the family’s archives.

Dow Family Papers

When I stepped down into the basement of Sam Dow’s great-grandson’s home, I immediately realized that the family’s collection was quite extensive. A number of books on the American Civil War sat on bookshelves above an old desk (or work bench) that had a number of storage chests both underneath and around it in the room. The surface of this desk was covered with stacks of letters, documents, and photographs among other things. I had been forewarned that it was unlikely that any of the letters or diaries, which were dated either prior to 1867 or after the early 1870s, would contain anything related to Dow’s baseball career in Knoxville. That said, I had an idea that the family collection would at least shed more light on Dow than what I had previously learned from reports of baseball games in Knoxville newspapers, from scanning various census and city records, as well as Dow’s obituaries. There, sitting on the desk, were newspaper clippings for stories that I had only previously seen online, including Dow’s 1921 Knoxville Sentinel interview. But there was so much more. One diary revealed what Dow had been doing on the eve of the American Civil War while the other diary pointed to where Dow went when he abruptly left Knoxville in the early 1870s before returning some five years later. There were numerous photographs of Dow, mostly in his latter years with his family, but there were also photographs of Dow in his early and late 20s, and several more in his late 40s and 50s. Moreover, there were photographs of fellow Masons, Knoxville merchant princes, and a baseball teammate that I instantly recognized thanks to his signature on the carte de visite bearing his likeness. And then, while sifting through a stack of documents, I found something that I did not expect—Dow had a close, personal friendship with the world’s richest man, oil baron John D. Rockefeller. In one hand, I was holding a newspaper clipping with a photograph of Rockefeller with his right hand on Dow’s left shoulder after the two had completed a round of golf in Ormond Beach, Florida, while I held a card from Rockefeller thanking Dow for remembering him on his birthday in my other hand. I spent an entire day only scratching the surface of the family’s collection; however, I managed to work my way through all of Sam B. Dow’s personal papers in the collection, which opened up so much more of Dow’s world to me that I had previously not known.

Knoxville Journal (Dec. 15, 1928)

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While it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty when Samuel Billings Dow first learned of the game of baseball, it is quite possible that he either witnessed or could have even played the game at a few points during his early years. Though born in 1839 in Bangor, Maine to Leonard and Rebecca Dow, young Sam was reared on “Dow’s Hill,” his family’s Exeter, New Hampshire farm where he often awoke early in the morning to milk cows in freezing temperatures. Dow and his siblings attended the crudest schools that the family could afford; however, brighter prospects in the 1850s permitted his father to send Dow to nearby Tilton Academy. He may well have been among the throng of spectators that turned out to watch students at the local academy first play a form of the game known as the "Massachusetts Game" before adopting the more nationally popular "New York Game" born in Brooklyn in the mid-1850s. The "New York Game" had already taken root nationally in the amateur game when Dow arrived in Louisville, Kentucky on the eve of the Civil War to work alongside his older brother, Charles, as a clerk and salesman in the grocery firm of William and Henry Burkhardt. The Burkhardts took both brothers under their wings and mentored them in the grocery trade (Charles later become a partner in the firm following the tragic death of William Burkhardt, who fell overboard a steamboat and drowned in the Ohio River). While there is no extant evidence to indicate that Dow played baseball in Louisville (or in Exeter for that matter), a number of young, aspiring high and low white-collar professionals joined Louisville’s two clubs—the Star and Louisville Base Ball Clubs—and regularly played on open lots within and adjacent to the business district.

Dow's parents (see below)

Leonard M. Dow

Rebecca Dow

Sam B. Dow's Diary

Baseball ceased to exist in Louisville when the American Civil War came. For Dow’s father, he feared that the war would divide his family. Two of his sons—Charles and Sam—had gone south of the Ohio River and set up residence in the slave state of Kentucky and both did not seem inclined to support the new president, Abraham Lincoln. Their anguished father sat down on December 27, 1860 to write a letter, which was addressed to his eldest son, Charles, but the message was directed towards both sons. “I have had of late some fearful forebodings in regard to your fate and Sam’s,” the elder Dow wrote, “but the darkness which inveiled [sic] me has vanished and a Glorious Sunshine of Patriotism shields you in your distant home; and my prayer is that no earthly considerations, however flattering, may ever tempt either of you to turn traitors to this Beloved Union. And had I the voice of an Archangel, the world would be in receipt of the sentiment which is embodied therein. Every farmer, mechanic, and working-men of all classes and grades; would, in this vast domain, wear the Motto of the Union or Death. Rather would I see your bodies pierced like the head of a petter-box, with bullets, than see you on a throne reared by traitors. . . . We must speak, and in tones of thunder that will hurl those demigogs [sic] into the abyss of eternal infamy; and so extinct may they be at least that no reptile or insect will be poisoned in their decay. When the time comes that we are to sacrifice all that we hold most dear, to the wild destructive fanaticism of a few State[s], you will see me, if in no other way, crawling upon my hands and knees, armed and equipped in defense of the Union. . . . I am as yet unable to see any justifiable cause for the course our seceding states are pursuing and every feature of their demonstration bears on the face of it, anarchy and rebellion, traitors in every respect, and without parallel in the history of the civilized world, and if committed in any other country, the traitors would have been strung up like onions—fifty in a string.”

Sam B. Dow, ca. 1860

Their father then pointed out that “If I recollect aright your electoral vote was not in favor of Lincoln and Hamlin, and although not men of your choice your submission to the will of the people, I say is a model rebuke to every state in the Union.” He admonished them: “I advise all that are not willing to submit to that arbitration to go to the tomb stones of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Clay, Webster, and their revolutionary fathers and like Rachel weep and not be comforted until the motto of our great Webster is indelibly stamped on their souls and passed on to future generations—Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable.”

Charles and Sam's Registration in KY's 5th Congressional Dist. 1863

Though Charles did not join the Confederacy, he did not enlist in the Union war effort either. He remained in the grocery business in Louisville where he spent the last 62 years of his life. If Sam Dow had either been influenced by his brother’s politics or was flirting with breaking bread with the Rebels, he had a change of heart. He immediately left Louisville for Indiana, where he was bent on joining the Union war effort. When President Abraham Lincoln responded to the firing on Fort Sumter by issuing a proclamation declaring that each state had to meet a quota of troops to aid the Union in its efforts to put down the rebellion, Dow raised a company of men and marched towards Indianapolis to answer the call. He arrived in Indianapolis, however, only to learn that Governor Oliver P. Morton had already met Lincoln's quota. Frustrated, Dow and his men disbanded and went home. But intent on fighting to preserve the Union, Dow made his way to Camp Joe Holt located along the Ohio River in Jeffersonville, Indiana. There he enlisted in the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry.

Dow's Civil War did not last long. He became severely ill after the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 and returned home to his family in New Hampshire where he remained until he recovered. Though his military service on the battlefield was brief, he may well have seen baseball played in camp as the game was played in both the eastern and western theaters of war. By the summer of 1863, however, Dow was back in Louisville working alongside Charles. But once news arrived that the Union army had largely liberated East Tennessee from Rebel control later that year, Dow offered his services to the federal government once more. He took a desk job with the Revenue Service and was stationed in Knoxville in May 1864.

Sam B. Dow, 2nd KY Cav. U.S.

Revenue Officer, Sam B. Dow (1868)

It was in Knoxville that Dow began to lay down roots. In addition to his role as a revenue officer, Dow became a partner in a grocery firm with William H. Lillard and was admitted into Knoxville’s most renowned Civil War era Masonic lodge, the Royal Arch Masons, Pearl Chapter, No. 24. Dow later became the Secretary of the Commandery Couer de Lion, No. 9 and eventually the Grand Commander of the Knights Templar of Tennessee. He quickly acquired a vast network of professional and personal connections that yielded a sense of community. That community provided its members, comprised of dynamic, resourceful professional urbanites—bankers, lawyers, insurance and real estate men, physicians, manufacturers and entrepreneurs—with sources of camaraderie, sociability, and entertainment. Some of the more civic and reform-minded leaders within this community turned their energies towards organizing and joining voluntary associations that aimed not only to uplift and improve society, but also to protect property, such as fire companies. Others, such as Dow, sought friendship and entertainment in sport. An avid hunter and expert marksman, who organized and became the president of Knoxville’s first gun club became nationally known, featuring in a late 19^th century promotional sales campaign by the U.S. Cartridge Company entitled, “Popular and Expert Trap Shooters of America,” which included Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody). Dow was also a foot racer of great merit who belonged to a fraternity of high and low white-collar professionals who participated in traditional sporting pastimes in an exclusive male preserve. A sporting fraternity emerged in nineteenth century American middle-class culture that emphasized clean sport and exercise to improve health, character, and morality. Muscular Christianity was a philosophical movement that advocated for the development of moral, devout, and physically fit men. Thus, baseball served as an ideal vehicle to improve one’s physical and spiritual well-being while providing masculine camaraderie, sociability, and entertainment.

Dow in the center in his Mason regalia

Dow often entered in foot races, such as this July 4th race that he won

U.S. Cartridge Company Promotional Campaign
(Dow appears in 2rd row, 4th from left. Annie Oakley appears center, bottom row)

On March 19, 1867, Dow called a meeting of approximately 60 men at John Cooper’s Star Billiard Saloon, located on the first floor of Ramsey’s Hall on Gay Street, to discuss organizing a base ball club. Among these men were a number of former Union veterans who themselves had some experience playing baseball either back home in the midwestern states of Ohio and Michigan, or had experienced the game while in camp during the war. Dow’s reminiscences reported in the November 20, 1921 issue of the Knoxville Sentinel (previously covered in Parts 1 and 2 of this series) traces the organization of his Knoxville Knoxvilles and that of the rival Holston Club, as well as his role in securing the use of land along the east side of Gay Street to play the first baseball games in the city. Dow would serve as the Knoxvilles first club captain and treasurer and was respected for his skills in the field both as a pitcher and a defender catching pop-ups and weak dasiy-cutters.

Dow's signature

As a pitcher, standing approximately 45 feet away from the batter, he was also prone to put himself at risk to stop a line drive struck straight towards him. In one of the first matches played against the Holston Club, a hot-liner hit right back at him struck the middle finger of his right hand with such ferocity that it bent it backwards. Dow’s broken finger caused him great pain and hindered his ability to grip the ball; therefore, he replaced himself with Major Eldad C. Camp, taking Camp’s position at third. However, the Knoxvilles soon lost control of the match as the Holstons began spraying shots all across the field; one hot-liner struck towards Dow who, afraid to catch it with his right hand, attempted to stop it with his leg, adding further insult—painful insult—to his previous injury. Frustrated, Dow pulled Camp from the pitcher’s point and pitched the remaining seven innings with three fingers of his lame right hand.

Dow took shots even when he was not on the ballfield. The Knoxvilles’captain was a favorite target of newspapermen John Fleming and William J. Ramage, who published the Free Press and the Herald respectively. Both Fleming and Ramage championed the Holston Club and often poked fun at the Knoxvilles’ misfortunes, whether it was a loss to the Holstons or even a gruesome injury such as those incurred by Dow and Spencer Munson, who famously dislocated his arm trying to throw a ball back in from the outfield. When listing Knoxville’s eligible bachelors for a December 1867 issue, Ramage could not help himself as he described Sam Dow as a “junior partner in a grocery store; not bad looking; agreeable in society; used to be considered good at base ball, but is now eclipsed by many brighter lights in said constellation.”

Herbert W. Hall

For those who knew Knoxville’s founding father of baseball and saw him play the game for quite a number of years, Dow is perhaps best remembered for his ninth-inning game winning home run against another East Tennessee rival club from Greeneville. That game, played in 1869 on the Gay Street Base Ball Grounds, was a favorite story of merchant prince Herbert W. Hall, who recounted the story of the riveting ending to that game to the Knoxville press on at least three occasions. Hall, who had recently arrived in Knoxville to clerk in Reuben S. Payne and Frank McNulty’s wholesale hat store, was working when a number of prominent citizens came into the store seeking Payne’s permission to allow Hall to stand in for Sam House, the Knoxvilles’ injured ace shortstop. Hall had a reputation in Nashville for being an excellent defender in the infield and, after some pleading by Captain Cyrus Zimmerman, who had some “skin in the game,” Payne agreed to give Hall the day off work to play in House’s stead. It was a close contest that had swung back and forth as the Knoxvilles headed to the plate down a single run to Greeneville in the bottom of the ninth. The first batter was quickly put out; however, the second made his base which brought Dow—the potential winning run—to the plate. Though Dow later contended that the Greeneville boys were determined to pitch around him, it appeared, according to Hall, that the Greeneville pitcher had developed a case of unsteady hands and shaky nerves as his first three pitches went far wide of the plate. Determined to take a swing on the next pitch, Dow stepped forward in the box. The pitch was low and slightly wide, but Dow caught it with the end of his bat and sent the ball screaming over the heads of the Greeneville scouts in the outfield. The ball rolled on seemingly forever in the direction of the railroad as Dow circled the bases and won the game for the Knoxvilles. “Everybody went wild, players, spectators and all,” Hall fondly recalled. “Hats went in the air and—speaking of hats, some playfully inclined citizens made a regular football of Capt. Zimmerman’s high silk headgear.” Zimmerman’s hat was knocked off and kicked around; however, he did not seem to mind. “‘Give ’er hell, boys!,’” Hall remembered Zimmerman gleefully shouting, “‘I’ve a $500 bet with ‘Wheat’ Williams and can buy another.’”

Sam B. Dow, ca. 1880s (see below)

In 1873, for unknown reasons, Dow picked up and left Knoxville for Delaware, where he purchased land in New Castle and went to work in the phosphate industry, as a superintendent of the Walton, Whann, and Co. in nearby Wilmington. A few years later he moved on to Florida with a cousin (John Anderson) and another childhood friend from New England where they were among the first to settle on a slither of land between the Halifax River and the Atlantic Ocean that became Ormond Beach. The trio of bachelors erected “Trappers Lodge” and started the Santa Lucia Orange Grove. They spent countless hours on their catboat plying the Halifax River between Ormond and Daytona bringing in tons of fresh fish, as well as venison, thanks to Dow’s muzzleloader. After a couple years, Dow became afflicted with malaria and returned to Knoxville. However, his affinity for the Florida coast never waned and he spent many winters in his retirement vacationing on its beaches and playing golf with his good friend and oil tycoon, John D. Rockefeller.

In 1878, Dow returned to Knoxville and took a job as a salesman in the wholesale grocery house of M.L. Ross & Co. He soon moved into Col. Frank McNulty’s grand hotel, the Hattie House and was there when the famed abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass came to town and stayed in the hotel, hardly causing the stir that it would have in many other southern cities in the era of Jim Crow. In late September 1883, fortune shined on Dow when Col. William Lockett dissolved his co-partnership with Martin L. Ross, thus opening a door for Dow to become partners with Ross. While Ross managed the office, Dow was tasked with overseeing the sales floor and supervising the company’s salesmen. Following the death of Ross in 1899, Dow was made the company’s vice-president. After about seven years, Dow left the Ross company and spent his remaining working years in the insurance industry, finally retiring just shortly after the end of World War I.

Though Dow was known to have relationships with daughters of some of Knoxville’s prominent merchant princes, he lived a bachelor’s life until the age of 45. On February 10, 1885, Sam B. Dow married Marie Aebli at First Presbyterian Church and then spent the next few weeks touring the South and spending some time in Florida. Marie was the daughter of Swiss immigrants Casper and Magdalena Aebli, who followed their friend Peter Staub (the owner of Knoxville’s famous Opera House and a two-term Mayor) to the United States and Knoxville. Casper Aebli, a tailor by trade, went into business with his friend Staub and over the course of the next 45 years, became, in the words of one Knoxville reporter, the “Dean of Local Tailors.” Together, Marie and Sam built a healthy and successful family, with five sons and three daughters. They made their home near Second Creek, at the base of Laurel Avenue at what was 410 10^th Street, just west of downtown Knoxville. That home would stand long past Sam’s death in 1928 (died of pneumonia) and Marie’s passing in November 1939 (after being ill for a number of years), taken down to make way for the 1982 World’s Fair.

Samuel B. Dow, Marie Aebli, & their children (ca 1902)

Casper & Magdalena Aebli family (Marie left next to her mother, 1871)

Capser Aebli left and his Tailor shop

As an interesting aside, or so for the vintage baseballist playing the game that Samuel B. Dow brought to Knoxville, I have been struck by the face that the Dow home would have resided approximately in the space that is today occupied between the Knoxville Museum of Art and the Candy Loft Apartments. That means that Dow’s home sat about 40 to 50 feet or so from the patch of grass that is commonly known as “World’s Fair Park Performance Lawn.” It was on that lawn that the Knoxville Holstons Vintage Base Ball Club played two matches as part of the East Tennessee Historical Society’s annual East Tennessee History Fair (2014-15) and one as part of Tennessee’s celebration of the Civil War Sesquicentennial. Though I did not know this fact at the time, reflecting back, the very idea of Dow’s ghost sitting on his front porch in his rocking chair watching us play Civil War era baseball is enough to make the hair stand up on the back of one’s neck. That said, to truly know Dow, is to know that he would not have remained a passive observer seated on his porch as a game of baseball was played within eyesight of him. Dow would have been down on the field of play, delivering a pitch to the batter at the dish!