Did a Flood Bring Baseball to Knoxville? - “1867 – A Season Like No Other: Tennesseans Catch the Base Ball Fever” (Vol. 1)

 

T.H. Smiley took this photograph of the "Great Flood" alonsgide the north bank of the Holston River at Knoxville, March 8, 1867

Before the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) tamed the Tennessee River by creating a managed system of dams and reservoirs – a “Great Chain of Lakes” – in the 1930s and 40s, melting wintry mountain snows and the speed with which their streams pushed water into the East Tennessee Valley mixed with early spring flooding rains that often resulted in a volatile cocktail of unpredictability. Rushing waters pushing their way southward from the confluence of the Holston and French Broad Rivers often tested the banks of the Tennessee River and its tributaries. Any amount of sustained rainfall over the region and the Tennessee’s waters quickly pushed out of its banks flooding rural farmlands and the few cities that lay along its winding and circuitous course between steep forested slopes, around sharp bends and prominent curves, before meandering across broader lowlands and looping north through fertile valleys emptying into the Ohio River.

The Great Flood of 1867 began on the evening of March 2 as the heavens opened over East Tennessee. Torrential rains and rapidly melting snows caused the creeks and rivers of the great valley of East Tennessee to swell into raging floodwaters. The waters of the Holston River through Knoxville rose twelve feet above the previous high mark of 1847 (the Tennessee River did not officially begin at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad Rivers until a federal statute in 1890). The river washed away mills, factories, warehouses, bridges across First and Second Creeks, and between 100-200 homes. Knoxville’s business district, which sat atop a half-square mile plateau overlooking the Holston River, became an island surrounded by the surging floodwaters. On March 13, the Knoxville Whig reported: “For the greater portion of last week, nothing was thought or talked of but the flood.” Bystanders lined up to gaze upon the rising waters, which only began to recede on March 10.

Among those curious bystanders overlooking the swollen waters of the Holston was Samuel Billings Dow, a twenty-seven-year-old, ambitious merchant. He was among the city’s emerging urban upper middle class. Dow, an avid hunter, marksman, and foot racer of great merit, sought a social, spiritual, and physical stimulus for both him and his friends—former Union and Rebel soldiers, fellow Masons, as well as clerks, bankers, physicians, insurance and real estate men, law students, and other professionals who had either been too young, or perhaps were privileged by wealth, to go off to war. He believed baseball was the antidote to improve one’s physical and spiritual well-being whole providing masculine camaraderie, socialization, and entertainment.

Samuel Billings Dow (ca. 1860)

“Base ball” (often spelled as two words in the nineteenth century) had manifested itself into “a perfect mania” in which Americans of all ages, races, and class were beginning to play from one coast to the other by the dawn of 1867. A handful of Nashvillians and Memphians had played the game as early the late 1850s. But following the American Civil War, Tennesseans across the state caught the “base ball fever” as men gathered across the state and organized clubs with great speed. Following the 1867 New Year holiday, a number of base ball clubs gathered and selected their officers and captains for the new season. The first known match of the 1867 season for a Tennessee club did not even occur in the Volunteer state. Chattanooga’s Lightfoot Club took the railroad south to Atlanta to play the Atlanta Club on January 2 and bested them by a score of 46 to 7.

Extant evidence suggests that the first baseball game to be played in Tennessee that season occurred in Memphis on Tuesday, January 15. The baseballists of the Pride of the South and the Stonewall Jackson Base Ball Clubs arrived at 10:30am and set up their field opposite of the Tennessee State Hospital on Pigeon Roost Road. The match lasted four and half hours and the result favored the Pride of the South Base Ball Club by 13 runs. 

Memphians began their season in earnest – six clubs were organized by the first of February. A challenge was soon sent by the Eagle Base Ball Club to the Pride of the South who dispatched their second nine to square off against the Eagle’s first nine on the southeast side of the Mississippi and Tennessee Railroad Depot. The game, which featured family members on both sides, was played on Sunday, January 27, 1867 and was very much a one-sided affair with the Pride scoring the victory 48 to 23. The members of the Pride Club soon hosted a grand ball at the Memphis Club Rooms in the Greenlaw Block in which over a hundred tickets were sold in many of the businesses they worked. It is estimated that some seventy-five couples feasted at the ball. Other grand balls would wait for later in the season as baseball matches soon sprung up all over the city. The Enterprise Base Ball Club, a group of northern businessmen, many former Union soldiers, sent a challenge to the Pride of the South; however, incessant rains postponed the match for a week. When the ground finally dried, the Enterprise claimed a six-run margin of victory, 38 to 32, owing to their defensive prowess in the garden. Though it was a closely contested match, reports indicate that both clubs exhibited “generous and creditable conduct” and that the Pride’s captain called for three cheers for the winners. 

As February drew to a close, newspapers across the state reported that Base Ball Clubs in Nashville and Sewanee were preparing to meet and a number of editors from other newspapers were calling on the young men in their respective cities and towns to catch the “base ball fever” too.

As Sam B. Dow looked out at the receding floodwaters he had baseball on the brain. Baseball was not a foreign game to him. Raised on “Dow’s Hill,” his family’s Exeter, New Hampshire farm, it is quite possible that he was among the throng of spectators as a teenager who turned out to watch students at the local academy play a form of the game known as the “Massachusetts Game,” known for its rule that permitted the “soaking” or “plugging” of a player – retiring a baserunner by hitting them with a thrown ball.  of players to achieve an out. It is also quite possible that Dow saw or played baseball in Louisville, Kentucky, when he arrived on the eve of the American Civil War to work alongside his older brother, Charles, as a clerk in the grocery firm of William and Henry Burkhardt. By the 1860, baseball was played in the “Falls City” along the Ohio River by a number of young, aspiring “high and low white-collar” working professionals who joined the Star and Louisville Base Ball Clubs who regularly played on open lots adjoining the business district. A brief stint in the 2nd Kentucky Calvary (Union) and a post with the U.S. Revenue Office during the American Civil War brought Dow to Knoxville in 1864. 

Local citizens of Knoxville can be seen in this clearer, close-up of Smiley's photograph.

Whether he played baseball or not is unknown; what is known is that Dow and many of the men he associated with were quite familiar with the game that was spreading throughout the Volunteer State as spring loomed on the horizon in 1867. With business slowed by the flood, Dow compiled a list of some sixty men who he thought might enjoy playing baseball. He called on these men to meet on March 19 at Joseph Cooper’s Star Billiard Saloon – the purpose of that meeting, to organize Knoxville’s first base ball club.   

The second installment of “1867 – A Season Like No Other: Tennesseans Catch the Base Ball Fever” will appear on March 19.