Henry C. Boschen (bottom row, second from left) and his semiprofessional team from Richmond pose with the National League’s Detroit team during the celebration of the Yorktown centennial in 1881. (Photo courtesy National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)
America’s pastime and lore go together like stitches on a ball. More than a century before the Flying Squirrels took the field, Richmond’s first professional baseball team came about because a physician prescribed outdoor exercise for a shoe factory owner. Thus, Henry C. Boschen (1845-98) receives distinction as the grandfather of Richmond baseball.
The second child of German immigrants John H. and Christina Johanna Boschen, he followed in his father’s footsteps in 1872 by opening a shoe factory in Richmond. His machine shop could turn out 300 pairs of women’s shoes in a week. He married Margaret Frischkorn on March 19, 1868, and together they had 12 children, six boys and six girls.
As repeated down through the generations, Boschen obeyed his doctor’s orders, taking a bat into a vacant lot and going through rounds of tossing up a ball to hit it.
This got boring, but Boschen didn’t have to play alone for long. During the 1870s and 1880s, local teams organized along neighborhood, ethnic and occupational lines. Richmond College (University of Richmond) and Randolph-Macon College formed ball clubs, as did businesses such as Baughman Brothers (The Printers), Old Dominion Iron and Nail Works (Nailers) and West, Broach & Co. (The Tinners). Additional sandlot teams — as described in the book “Richmond and Baseball” by W. Harrison Daniel and Scott P. Mayer — made a total of eight adult clubs and five junior teams by 1875.
The two notable adult teams in 1878 were the Atlantic Club and the Richmond Club, for which Boschen played. As the stories go, he is one of several men credited with having invented the spitball, using slippery elm to produce more saliva. To improve his curve ball, he reportedly paid $25 to have a Washington man come to Richmond and teach him.
He recruited players from workers in his Shockoe Slip wholesale shoe factory, on East Main Street between 14th and 15th streets. In 1882, he formed the Richmond Baseball Club. “Whenever he spotted a promising young player, Boschen offered the man a job and a chance to play ball,” Robert H. Gudmestad wrote in a 1998 feature for the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography: “Baseball, the Lost Cause, and the New South in Richmond, Virginia, 1883-1890.”
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Charley Ferguson was among Boschen’s players who went on to play for major league teams. (Image courtesy National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)
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Billy Nash was among Boschen’s players who went on to play for major league teams. (Image courtesy National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)
The shoemaker’s team included Charley Ferguson (1863-88), a right-handed pitcher and second baseman from Charlottesville who played for the University of Virginia team but never enrolled. Ferguson’s talent took him to the Philadelphia Athletics of the National League. By 1887, he stood at 22-10 with a 3.00 earned run average. In 72 games, he hit .337, .417, .470, which included 14 doubles, six triples and three homers, in 264 turns at bat. A career that might’ve made him one of the greats ended four years later, when typhoid fever struck him out at age 25. During the 1888 season, the Philadelphia Quakers, Washington Nationals, New York Giants and Boston Beaneaters wore black crepe on their left sleeves in Ferguson’s memory.
Outfielder Edward C. “Mouse” Glenn (given name Glinn), a Richmond native, (1860-92), enjoyed three years of major league play, mostly in the American Association. He died at 31 from injuries he sustained during an infield collision while playing with the Boston Beanaters. You can go to Shockoe Hill Cemetery to pay your respects.
Another Boschen recruit, Richmonder Billy Nash, (1865-1929) started as a teenage shortstop until going to third base, “after the first baseman complained that the velocity of the youngster’s throws left his hands sore,” Gudmestad writes. Nash spent 11 years with the National League’s Beaneaters, where, with Nash as captain, they snagged the league’s championship pennant three times.
Edward Christopher “Pop” Tate (1860-1932), who also carried the baseball sobriquet of “Dimples,” became the most renowned member of Boschen’s initial team. One game, he threw out five runners at second base, and he, like Nash, transferred to Boston. The sports stadium on Mayo Island, which hosted games beginning in 1894, received the name Tate Field, where, from 1923 to 1941, both baseball and football were played despite flood, fire and a grandstand collapse that led to the 1929 opening of City Stadium. Tate is buried at Riverview Cemetery, where sometimes the wind can sound like a cheering crowd.
By 1881, Boschen’s team, The Richmonds, played at what was called Boschen Field or the Richmond Base-Ball Park near the present Kroger at North Lombardy street. The success of the team gave rise to a grandstand “with two private boxes on each end … expressly for the ladies.” Spectators paid admission, but Boschen apparently funded the club’s operations mostly from his own pocket, adds Gudmestad.
One of the few media outlets covering the evolution of professional baseball, James P. Cowardin’s Daily Dispatch chronicled the sport with flourish and detail. Cowardin died on Nov. 21, 1882, just as baseball was heating up.
Boschen’s semiprofessional team frequently played the Washington Nationals and teams from Baltimore and Philadelphia, holding its own against the out-of-towners.
In one instance, Boschen arranged for his own “picked nine” team of white players to take on an African-American team called the Swans, Mayer writes in his University of Richmond master’s thesis, “The First 50 Years of Professional Baseball in Richmond, Virginia, 1883-1932.” He writes, “The advertisements promoting this game highlighted Swans star ‘FOWLER, the only colored professional in America.’ ”
Bud Fowler, born John W. Jackson Jr. (1858-1913) in Fort Plain, New York, started his baseball career in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1878. He played more games in the minor leagues than any other black player before the 1950s, hitting .308 in more than 2,000 at-bats in organized baseball.
Until the 1880s, there was no official policy excluding black players from teams with whites, Mayer writes, but the practice of segregation soon took hold. African-American teams played at Boschen’s park, but their fans couldn’t sit in the stands; instead they stood alongside the fence line and cheered enthusiastically for the home teams.
The cheering for Boschen’s team stopped in June 1883, when 18 men of means (eight of them Confederate veterans) formed a joint stock company they called the Virginia Base-Ball Association. Then it became nine men out, as Boschen’s players left him. The “wholesale exodus,” writes Gudmestad, apparently caught Boschen unawares.
In a statement published in the local papers, he reminded Richmonders of his success “in getting up a good club,” and working for years without receiving any profit. He urged patrons “to excuse the playing of the nine which I have been compelled to get up hurriedly until I can again put in the field a nine which may be an honor and credit to this city.”
Boschen continued fielding a team into 1885 with new uniforms, an expanded ballpark and players from other cities. His efforts weren’t enough against organized professionals, though, and the team fizzled out.
The competing Virginians team held Confederate-themed fundraisers at a new field on the south side of today’s Monument Avenue between North Allen Avenue and North Lombardy Street, where African-American clubs were restricted from play.
Women attending the games on hot days received a cooler of ice water, while the men purchased beer and whiskey from sellers under the stands. Gudmestad records, “Attendance at the park, including African-Americans, who had their own area, swelled to 3,000 on holidays or when a well-known opponent came to town.”
Although the Virginians made it into the major leagues for five months (the only Richmond ball club to do so), consistent lopsided victories caused a decline of attendance and revenue as fans lost interest. It didn’t help that Thomas Carpenter, the club’s secretary-treasurer, cleaned out its safe and ran to Canada. The club folded in September 1885 and the Robert E. Lee monument went up in 1890 on the former site of the ballpark’s central gate.
Henry Boschen died at his Glen Allen residence on Oct. 21, 1898, and is buried in Hollywood Cemetery.
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