Knoxville Baseball Began at Cooper's Star Billiards Saloon - “1867 – A Season Like No Other: Tennesseans Catch the Base Ball Fever” (Vol. 2)

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” (generally spelled as two words in the nineteenth century) club. Samuel Billings Dow compiled a list of nearly sixty men that he thought might be interested in starting a baseball team. Most of the names on Dow’s list were close acquaintances who, like him, had served either in the Union Army or were members of one of Knoxville’s masonic lodges. But there were also a handful of names of young men who 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 on the evening of 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.

Samuel Billings Dow 

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 "F. Heart” & Bros. sign.

What followed from that evening’s meeting was the organization of the city’s first baseball club—the Knoxville Knoxvilles. Of the twenty-two members who have been positively identified from a search of all extant sources, thirteen served in the American Civil War (ten were officers).  At an average of twenty-five years of age, 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—Ansel and Henry Ingersoll—from President Andrew Johnson’s adopted hometown of Greeneville. The outlier on Dow’s Knoxvilles 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 it 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 purposely boycotted the March 19 meeting. Much like 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 Republican Governor William Brownlow’s administration (Brownlow and several prominent local Republicans were elected honorary members of the Knoxvilles).
 
Newspapers helped promote the game of baseball because accounts of baseball matches 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 when the two rival editors became partners in 1867 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. Though they occasionally reported on other clubs and matches in the city, they focused on the Holstons. Moreover, due to their press being located adjacent to Cooper’s Star Billiards Saloon, they had a direct pipeline into the club’s meetings.
 
Beyond a scan of Knoxville newspapers and census records, 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, the Knoxville Knoxvilles Vintage Base Ball Club (VBBC) honors the national game that was first played in the city in May 1867. Those first matches 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 Cooper’s Star Billiards saloon 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 the organization of Knoxville’s first vintage baseball club. Within five months of that meeting, some thirty East Tennessee baseballists assembled on the grounds of the Historic Ramsey House to play vintage baseball. Although located about five miles east of the original Gay Street Base Ball Grounds, the Ramsey House has a tangible connection to the origins of Knoxville baseball. The historic property was the home of a prominent East Tennessee family whose name was on the building (Ramsey Hall) in which Joseph L. Cooper opened his restaurant and Star Billiards saloon and also hosted Knoxville’s first two baseball clubs during the city’s inaugural season of baseball.   

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

The third installment of “1867 – A Season Like No Other: Tennesseans Catch the Base Ball Fever” will trace the organization of a number of other baseball clubs throughout the Volunteer state during the early weeks of the Spring of 1867 and will appear in early April. Beginning in May, blog posts will detail the organization of the Tennessee Base Ball Association, the first games played in Knoxville, and will chronicle the life and times of a number of Knoxville’s original baseballists.

Following Sources for Joseph L. Cooper include:

1860 Census listing Nancy Kelso Hudiburg

1870 Census listing Joseph & Nancy Cooper

1880 Census listing Joseph & Nancy Cooper

Joseph Cooper Obituary, Knoxville Tribune, Aug. 13, 1894

Joseph L. Cooper Grave, Old Gray Cemetery