East Tennessee boasts a rich baseball heritage, celebrated through Regional Baseball Stories, a collection of submitted tales from the community.
Rugby Tennessee opened in October 1880 with an early map of the village showing a cricket grounds. The Britishfounded village, composed of settlers from both England and elsewhere in America, initially attracted mostly young single men. By that time, the Civil War had boosted interest in baseball instead of that other bat-and-ball sport popular in Britain.
So it was little surprise that in Rugby baseball debuted on March 15, 1882. Youthful Britons as well as young Americans wanted the newest sport. And in Rugby, perhaps they were all tiring a bit of tennis.
The town newspaper advertised “A Base Ball Match” to be played at 2 p.m. between The Young America B.B.C. and The Pioneer B.B.C. The teams appeared from those titles to form along the lines of U.S. natives versus newly arrived settlers in the pioneering wilderness. This section of Tennessee was only opened to settlement with completion of the Cincinnati Southern’s railroad, also new in 1880.
Who won? Surprisingly, it was the Pioneers, “who with but one exception were Englishmen,” The Rugbeian reported.
“This, being the first time the Britishers had played the game, rather elated the Pioneers, and encouraged them in fresh efforts in their Cousins’ National field sport. The day was very fine, and we noticed on the ground the beauty, talent and elite of Rugby.”
The length of the game was 2 hours, 32 minutes. A.H. Brown served as the umpire while “Messrs. Marvin and
Alexander as scorers.”
Not content to play among themselves, Rugby lads very soon decided it was time for a town team. The very next month, a meeting at the schoolroom was called to former a proper club, bylaws and all.
By May 2, all governing rules were adopted and a site was chosen for play, with practice on May 13. But spring rain ruined an initial game that month.
By June 1882, the site picked near the “Savage Club” was described in the paper as “a very pretty break in the great
monotony of trees… which is used frequently for foot-ball, and base-ball games, and may be said to be the field of the Rugby Isthmian Games,” a reference to an ancient Greek festival. The town’s druggist, Thomas Fardon, was baseball club president.
On the Fourth of July in 1883, baseball was among the celebratory games of the holiday. “Lawn Tennis and Base-ball
were being played by some of the older inhabitants of the community and visitors to the town,” observed the Plateau-
Gazette as the newspaper was then called.
But the festivities for July 4 in 1885 were held on the grounds of Rugby’s first hotel, the Tabard Inn, which had burned to the ground the year before. That was a match between “the Rugby Base Ball Club and the Red Rovers,” who won 11-10.
It’s unclear where the Rovers were based, but in October of 1885 the Rugby team was scheduled to play Sunbright.
Something happened and the game had to be rescheduled for later that month in Sunbright, also in Morgan County.
Sunbright won, “mainly due to the close proximity of the creek to the playing ground, the ball being repeatedly lost in the brush on the creek bank,” the Rugby Gazette as it was then called reported. “Mr. Harry Blacklock filled the thankless office of umpire with judgement and fairness.”
Interest in the sport didn’t decline in the next decades in Rugby, even as its population did. Photographs in the Historic Rugby Archives today show several teams playing, with members recruited from nearby parts of Fentress County as well.
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By David J. Gerleman
published in the Journal of East Tennessee History, Vol 91, 2019
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