(In honor of yesterday’s opening day for baseball at Covenant Health Park, today’s article by recurring contributor Paul James of the Knoxville History Project takes you waaay back to a time this opening day for the Knoxville Smokies or the fancy new stadium would have been hard for the most ardent lover of baseball to imagine.)
If you’ve been under a rock of late, or simply don’t care about the sport, then it may have escaped your notice that a new baseball stadium is about to open downtown. In a departure from my “Ghost Walking” column, I’m gong to take a quick dive into Knoxville baseball over the years.
I’ll be frank, before I started this article, I could write most of what I knew about baseball on the back on an envelope, if not a stamp. I grew up playing mostly football (soccer to most of you) and cricket. Other than a few games of “Rounders,” at school, the only time I have ever swung a baseball bat has been during a virtual Wii game in my living room. That said, I have been to the Tennessee Smokies stadium in Kodak twice. I enjoyed the spectacle, if not the heat, but neither time did I really appreciate fully the rules of the game.
A new exhibit, “Home Runs and Home Teams: A History of the National Pastime” just opened at the East Tennessee History Center at 601 S. Gay Street and it’s definitely worth a visit. The curators and staff there always do a brilliant job at telling a story, in this case the history of baseball throughout the state. It was interesting to see an old “Rounders” bat and ball, and startling to see how small they were. That game dates back to the 1700s.
Clearly, immigrants to the United States brought with them the love of “bat and ball games,” though cricket has still to make much of an impression in America. Beyond the frontier days, and after the Civil War, men began to consider playing games again rather than fight each other, and baseball began to take off.
In those early days of the sport, which later became regarded generally as “America’s Pastime,” baseball wasn’t one word, but rather two and often hyphenated: Base ball or Base-ball. A quick look at the handy online NGram viewer, which plots the frequency of the use of a word or name over the years, suggests that the old spelling peaked just before the turn of the 20th century.
According to newspaper digital archives, the first proper mention of a baseball game in our city appears to be in May of 1867 when the Knoxville Whig ran a list of honorary members of the Knoxville Base Ball Club. The list included Perez Dickinson and “Parson” Brownlow, two high-profile Knoxvillians, perhaps listed for their name recognition or financial contributions rather than sports ability since they were in their mid-late 50s and 60s respectively. That’s just two years after the end of the Civil War and during a time that undoubtedly the city was still shaking off that awful conflict, re-building the town, and maybe on an optimistic day, when the sun was shining, actually having some fun. The game must have caught on fast. In the fall of that year, a “Grand Base Ball Tournament” was even held here in Knoxville.
The first base-ball grounds were downtown, in a “bowl” of sorts between where Gay Street and State Streets are today on the 400 block, essentially where the Promenade Parking garage is. Head out the back door of Mast General Store and look towards Marble Alley Lofts and you’ll get a sense of the location. This was a time when that area was a challenge to build on given the resources available and architectural and construction limitations of a small town.
During the 1870s, baseball game coverage proved to be erratic, so its hard to get a sense how many games were played. Newspaper reporters often only mentioned the base-ball grounds in relation to other events like during a political rally in 1872 when the grounds were “appropriately festooned and decorated with flags, while lanterns hung all over it.”
Soon, part of the grounds or the land adjacent to it on Gay Street became part of the site of Sanford, Chamberlin & Albers’ drugstore on the corner of Gay Street and Union Avenue. You can see that building and the general site of the base ball grounds on the 1871 map of Knoxville. A year later, Woodruff & Co.’s new building went up. That name still connects over 16 decades to today—the building that houses the Downtown Grill & Brewery still says Woodruff’s on it. Apart from Sanford, all these other businessmen were Union Army veterans who came to Knoxville after the Civil War.
But we get a little more clarity by 1875 when baseball action extended to the university campus on what was then called College Hill where the “The Riverside” (sometimes called the Knoxville Reds) team enjoyed a fine reputation. There was also a colored team, whose captain, one Charles Eaton, challenged (some might have said “blatantly baited”) “The Riverside” to a game. Details of the ensuing game, if it actually occurred, were overshadowed by a scuffle on Cumberland Avenue, between Eaton and a UT cadet, when Eaton’s “jaw was accidentally knocked forcibly against cadet Jones’ fist.” The issue went to local court where Eaton was represented by Black attorney William Yardley, who later ran, unsuccessfully, for Tennessee Governor. But who won the case is difficult to know.
By the beginning of the 20th century, few teams, it seems, were pitching balls. Enter successful banker William Caswell, who was well known (having served as a city alderman in 1885 and 1886) and the city was about to get a new park with facilities for baseball. A known sportsman, Caswell played baseball in the 1860s and was also a big fisherman and hunter. He was renowned for peddling his “Caswell Grapefruit” which he’d learned to grow during time spent in Florida. He helped fund the new stadium in East Knoxville that opened as Caswell Park in 1917. Within the park, the baseball ground later became known as Smithson Stadium after local accountant and City Councilman, W.N. Smithson, who was also a baseball fanatic.
Early games at Caswell Park focused on local business teams such as the pharmaceutical rivals Sanford, Chamberlain, & Albers, vs. Chapman Drugs. Other leagues were made up of business or even industry teams, including the Jefferson Woolen Mill team (from the factory on the river near Scottish Pike), which played teams like Vestal at the Vestal diamond in South Knoxville. There were many other teams, including local newspaper teams, the Sentinel and Journal. And the baseball exhibit even mentions the Emmett Machinist Club, comprised of workers from the railroad companies from 1867. Seems like baseball fever took off in a big way.
The 1920s was a particularly busy decade for Knoxville baseball. Tying in with the city’s biggest public project—creating a new national park— our minor-league team, the Knoxville Pioneers, changed their name to the Knoxville Smokies. Caswell Park became their home ground. And fans were in for a real treat in 1925 when the New Yankees came to this park to play the Brooklyn Dodgers in an exhibition game.
Even I’m aware that there are few names, if any, bigger in baseball than Babe Ruth. The baseball hero was here for that Yankees game and again three years later with Lou Gehrig to play the Knoxville Smokies. The Yankees beat the Smokies, 14-4 and went on to win the World Series again later that year. (Ruth and Gehrig later returned to Caswell Park for a “short series” in 1934.)
The Giants or Black Giants, Knoxville’s only competitive African American baseball team, typically played at places like the former Leslie Street Field near Mechanicsville, but if they were doing well graduated to Caswell Park, too.
In some ways, the 1940s were a golden era for African American teams, then playing what was known as the Negro League. Well respected teams came to Caswell Park such as the Homestead Grays (who claimed both Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. as home cities) and under new floodlights, featured Josh Gibson, then considered “the Babe Ruth of the Negro League.” The Knoxville Grays coined their name after the Homesteads.
Baseball hero Willie Mays also played here with out-of-town teams in the Negro League in the 1940s, but later signed with the New York Giants, first playing with their minor league team. He came back to play Caswell Park several times during his career.
It’s always been odd to me that you can find a sports team named for one city playing in a totally different one. In the UK at least, you wouldn’t a team like Manchester United playing football in Newcastle unless its for an away game. But the Knoxville Smokies moved to Mobile, Alabama in 1944 for a time and then returned. (If you wish to get read about all the permutations of Knoxville minor league teams then check out the Knoxville Smokies Wikipedia page, it’s an interesting read.)
The baseball stands at Caswell Park burned down in 1953 and replaced by Knoxville Municipal Stadium and several years later renamed Bill Meyer Stadium. A onetime major league catcher, Meyer, who claimed his first game was at Chilhowee Park in 1907, had then just retired as the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He returned to the city of his youth where he had attended Knoxville High School with future Hollywood Director, Clarence Brown (who made a film about the then-losing Pirates, the original Angels in the Outfield in 1951), but enjoyed only a few years of baseball at the new stadium that would be named for him after he died in 1957.
Baseball went quiet in the 1960s, the Knoxville team moved back to Mobile again, and game attendance overall fell during that era. By the early 1970s, the Knoxville Smokies returned to play in the Southern League under a new name, Knoxville Sox. The change paid off immediately and at the end of the season they defeated Jacksonville to win the league in 1974.
Finding a dynamic photograph of Bill Stadium, which was demolished in 2003, has proven to be a challenge. The only one I know of (see below), with its faltering lettering looks like it might be a still photo from a Planet of the Apes movie, but without the apes. Perhaps it’s a little representative of baseball in Knoxville during the 1970s and in later times.
Much later, in 1999, they played their last game at Bill Meyer Stadium before being offered a new one in Kodak, becoming the Tennessee Smokies.
But here we are, the Smokies are back in Knoxville and surely, with a brand-new stadium, Covenant Health Park, they’ll stay. Whether you like baseball or not, that’s something to celebrate and helps maintains the city’s vibrancy. And due to something akin to creative genius, you’ll also be able to watch Knoxville One soccer team there when the baseball diamond will be transformed into a soccer pitch and back again overnight. I’ll still call it football, but I’m happy to lose the old hyphen in baseball.
Further reads:
The Reign of Monarchs, Barons & Clowns: Big-time Negro League in a minor-league city by Jack Neely
Bottom of the Ninth: Some awkward late-career drama for two old pros by Jack Neely