The First Reds

Knoxville’s championship season of 1879

The long-awaited return of minor-league baseball to downtown Knoxville is stirring up some old stories, especially at the Museum of East Tennessee History’s worthy exhibit about baseball throughout the state. It was our first team sport, a couple of decades before we knew much about football. For 50 years or so, Knoxville seemed mainly a baseball town.

America’s pastime commenced in Knoxville very soon after the Civil War; according to some memories, the first games were between former soldiers of the blue and gray.

And it was a long time before the color orange became holy in East Tennessee. But somehow, in between those two colorful eras, another color rallied Knoxville’s earliest team-sports fans. Our team was the Knoxville Reds.

By some accounts, the Reds germinated as a club of players from the pre-UT East Tennessee University that had distinguished themselves with red stockings. But it was just an informal club, never an officially sanctioned thing at a university that didn’t even have an athletic department. The story goes that a non-collegiate Knoxville club played the UT Reds in May, 1878, beat them, and merged into one team of all-stars. Thereafter, the Knoxville Reds, no longer associated with any college, were challenging the best teams of other cities in the region. That Knoxville Nine were hailed as “the champion base ball club of this section.” They wore crimson hosiery, of course—and a “Harvard cap,” whatever that was.

Where they met was not always clear; it was assumed all readers knew where the ball games would be. The original “Base Ball Grounds” were located in a low-lying area below the east side of the 400 block of Gay Street; it flourished there when there were no buildings to get in the way. The steep slope from the street down to the First Creek floodplain formed a sort of natural amphitheater that could accommodate hundreds of fans.

But by the mid-1870s, there were indeed some buildings there, and by 1876, it was being called “the old Base Ball Grounds”—the word old perhaps suggesting it was no longer used for that purpose.
Later ball fields were at Baldwin Park, out Asylum Avenue on the west side of town, near Mechanicsville–or on the south side, that area soon to be used as a horse-racing track and now known as Suttree Landing. But just before those eras, some memories recorded in later years suggest that by the late 1870s, baseball games were held in what was later known as the Five Points area of East Knoxville, near Chestnut Street. It was green countryside then, accessible by foot or by mule-drawn streetcar.

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Over a period of about half a century, there were several teams known as the Knoxville Reds. The “First Reds,” often distinguished that way in memory, were together for only a couple of years, but became the stuff of nostalgic legend.

In years to come, the Knoxville Reds became almost mythological, inflated in tales related by old men in the cafes, confident that the awed young folk could never check on their stories. Often the dates are off. But the stories they told of athletic heroism and regional championships did have at least a kernel of truth.

The Reds were impressed with the formidable assemblage they’d created in 1878, and that August, the proud team had their team picture taken at McRary & Branson, near what’s now the Tennessee Theatre.

We can only hope to find it. Please check your attics.

 

 

They even elected officers. The team president was Eben Alexander, the 27-year-old a UT classics professor who had attended Yale, which did have an athletic program. He graduated in 1873, when Yale’s baseball team was an early intercollegiate contender. Alexander was small in stature, and not always healthy, and perhaps was not one of the standout players in those early teams. But he loved athletics to a degree which would later be globally notable. In 1878, his role as “president” may have been equivalent to a coach or manager. He would later loom much larger in an international athletic endeavor.

As a player, we’re more sure of the Reds’ captain. Martin Condon, son of Irish immigrants with athletic brothers, had attended Georgetown College as it was developing an athletic program. He played right field, and was one of the team’s star hitters and fielders.

James F. Rule, left field, a staffer for his father’s newspaper, the Chronicle, played left field.

At catcher was W.C. “Bill” Hunt, in an era when the catcher was often the hero of the game. Sometimes called “Overhead Hunt,” he reportedly had an “uncanny knack for judging foul flies.”

At first base was John Houk, who might have seemed privileged. His father, Republican politician Leonidas Houk was elected to U.S. Congress that year. His brother, Lincoln C. “Linc” Houk, sometimes filled in as pitcher, as did Harry “Shorty” Lloyd.

Shortstop Alex McMillan was a good hitter and infielder; in street clothing, he was a pioneer realtor.

Charles Roth, known as a coal dealer, was one of the best hitters.

Third baseman W.F. “Piggy” Hughes “presided over the hot corner and was noted for his remarkable wing, the nemesis of batsmen.”

But the star pitcher was Jack Sneed, known for his “perplexing curve ball.” For many years, it was claimed that Sneed, of Knoxville, introduced the curve ball to the South.

By most accounts, minor-league professional baseball didn’t commence in Knoxville until several years later, 1896 or so. Still, it’s hard to claim these Reds were purely amateurs. They often played for a cash prize, $100 or $200, sometimes going entirely to the winner, sometimes split between the winner and the loser, with calculations based on the final score. Of course, by modern standards, those stakes would be the equivalent of several thousand dollars.

Another aspect that makes them seem like a semi-pro team was that they were not all from Knoxville; some came here just to play ball. Pitcher Harry Lloyd was “secured from” the Nashville Lincks. (Was money exchanged?). The more famous pitcher, Jack Sneed, went home to Huntsville, Ala., at the end of the baseball season. It would appear Sneed came to Knoxville just to play baseball.

And there’s no question these games were pretty serious. “Those were the days when the sporting blood of men ran thick,” a writer who’d interviewed players later remarked. “Houses, lots, and personal property were bet on the issue of a single game by Knoxville fans.”

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More than 40 years later, in the era of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, there was a new interest in the history of America’s Pastime, and good writers who tried to picture it. Just before the opening of the baseball season of 1920, when a few surviving contenders and fans were still around to share their memories, Harold I. Leyshon wrote an article about the 1878 season. Leyshon wrote for the Knoxville Journal & Tribune, which was edited by octogenarian Union veteran William Rule—father of one of the Knoxville Reds.

It was an era, Leyshon wrote, “when gloves and other modern paraphernalia of baseball were unknown, when three foul flies constituted an out, and when the catcher was rightly considered the hero of the team.”

He added, “Infielders speared hot grounders and line drives with their bare hands…. Outfielders fielded flies without aid of sunshade or glove, and winged their throws to the plate with the precision and accuracy of a 20th-century Cobb.”

In that earlier era before full-time sportswriters, it would appear that only certain games got memorable attention in print. Among their first publicized games of 1878 was a Fourth of July tournament, part of a gala holiday tournament in Chattanooga involving teams representing Knoxville, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Huntsville, Ala.

A running joke about the Reds was that they were pretty small, mostly skinny, and some of them short. Those who accompanied the Reds to the field could tell they would need talent to compensate for their lack of size and muscle compared to the other teams. The Reds beat the Huntsville team, then later the same day faced Chattanooga, winner of the contest with Nashville. The score was even until the sixth inning, when the exhausted Knoxville team came apart.

Chattanooga won the $100 pot. Adjusted for inflation, that would be the equivalent of around $3,000. A later game was for twice that. It would appear that the pot was shared among the players.

Most of the players had day jobs, though, and on occasion the pot went to a worthy cause, as in September, 1878, when it went to yellow-fever relief efforts. That summer was one of the most devasting for the mosquito-borne epidemic, which killed an estimated 20,000 Americans, most of them in the Deep South.

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After beating Nashville in September, the Reds claimed the title of state champion. Following their victory over the Cleveland Plug-Uglies, a team that included several Chattanooga players—team membership was fluid in those days—the Reds were welcomed home with a late-night banquet at Schubert’s Saloon, at Gay and Cumberland.

Of course, we tend assume these teams of that day and time were all young white men. However, Black men played baseball, too. For at least one game in the summer of 1879, the Knoxville Reds fielded a player named Eaton, which was the same name as that of the captain and champion player of a local Black team from a couple of years before. Charles Eaton was a hotel waiter who’d been in the news in 1875 when a UT ball player from Memphis had assaulted him for having the temerity to challenge the all-white college team to a game.

In one 1879 game, a rare sloppy and lopsided 25-6 loss to the other local team, the Knoxvilles, one “Eaton” was the only Red not charged with any errors. Eaton was not an especially common name, and it would be interesting to discover a rare case of integrated baseball in 1879, but further research suggests that player was probably UT student A.B. Eaton, a young white man, not the Black player Charles Eaton.

By then, the Reds’ manager was H.B. Branner. Leading the Reds must have been good for his public image. The following year, Branner was elected, at age 29, Knoxville’s youngest mayor in history.

A Knoxville Chronicle article reprinted in the Nashville Tennessean that July remarked that the Reds were undefeated at home, and had lost only once “abroad,” in Chattanooga. “Many people think their fielding work the finest in the South, and at the bat they have come out strong this year. Hurrah for the Reds!”

In an Independence Day tournament in 1879, the Knoxville Reds beat Memphis, who had beat Nashville and Chattanooga to claim the Tennessee-Alabama-Georgia championship.

On July 26, 1879, the Knoxville Reds, with about 100 fans on the same train, arrived in Atlanta for what amounted to a major tournament, by the standards of the day.

“Yesterday at noon the Knoxville Reds reached the city by the passenger train of the Western and Atlantic,” reported the Atlanta Constitution, “and were met at the train by the Alerts who escorted them to the Kimball where the club will be entertained during their stay in the city.” The Alerts were an Atlanta team that might have been associated with a fire-equipment manufacturer. The huge Kimball House was a luxury hotel, six stories tall, with 500 rooms and the first elevators ever seen in Atlanta. Even without baseball, it would have been an exciting trip.

“The Reds are accompanied by about 100 friends, who, from what we learned have come for the purpose of backing their favorites quite heavily in the tournament. The club is composed of a fine-looking body of young men and will doubtless be heard from before the day closes.”

They noted that “Mr. J.F. Rule, the right fielder of the Nine, is a staffer at the Knoxville Chronicle, and will doubtless dish up the tournament in his happiest style.” It seems a polite way of warning Rule it would be a conflict of interest for an athlete to double as sportswriter.

The games took place at Oglethorpe Park, a relatively new park that became part of Atlanta’s postwar identity, and included a lake and a racetrack. Two years after the baseball tournament, it would host the International Cotton Exposition.

The series of games mathematically determined “the championship of the South.” The Reds beat the Alerts decisively.

Their next game was against the Dixies, of Greensboro, Ga., who “enjoy the reputation as champions of this part of the country.” A small town about 75 miles east of Atlanta, Greensboro was the future retirement home of former Yankee slugger Mickey Mantle, but why the tiny rural community would earn a competitive baseball reputation in the 1870s is less than obvious.

The Reds’ Hunt, Lloyd, and Sneed were the champs in keeping the rivals from scoring much. Sneed’s curve balls drew special notice. In all, 18 of the Dixies’ outs were strikeouts. “They can’t hit those curved balls worth a cent.”

Rain ended the game in the eighth inning, when the score was 16-4, Knoxville. The Nashville Tennessean ran the headline, “Champions of the South: The Knoxville Reds Victorious at Atlanta.”

“Our boys and all their friends are jubilant over their signal success. They return to Knoxville with their colors flying, and with the undisputed title of “Champions of the South.”

The Cleveland Herald reported that they returned from Atlanta “covered all over with glory—and dirt.”
Late that October, Captain Rule, captain of the Reds, declined to play the Sewanee Blues of Chattanooga due to unnamed difficulties with arrangements. It was the anti-climactic end of an era.

Before formal leagues, it was impossible to make any consistent living in baseball, and the champion Reds drifted into other careers, some of them in other states.

But they stayed in touch. They announced there would be a reunion of the Knoxville Reds in May, 1884, about five years after their triumphal season, featuring a banquet and dance.

 

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A later team with only tenuous connections to the champions of 1879 called themselves the Knoxville Reds, too, and were regional contenders for three or four seasons in the 1880s, but became known as the Second Reds.

There was a Third Reds, in the conventional minor-league professional era, that emerged in 1902, when the legend of the First Reds was still well remembered. The name choice seemed to bode well: they were champions of the Tennessee-Alabama League in 1904, the first official championship for a Knoxville pro team. But their business model apparently fizzled soon after that. The not-quite immortal name of the Knoxville Reds was revived one last time in 1912—before changing to the Pioneers, in 1921, and then, in 1925, as Knoxville was associated with major national park project, the Smokies.

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The destinies of the “First Reds” are as impressive for their highs and lows as for their play on the field. Several of that original Nine encountered surprising fates.

The most famous star of ’79 was Jack Sneed, who seems to have existed in Knoxville mainly for the baseball, reputedly introducing the curve ball to the South, as sportswriters would remember for a century to come. He left Knoxville after the end of the 1879 season, when he got a good job in Memphis as a cotton broker. But John L. “Jack” Sneed’s life sounds as twisty as one of his curves. After that reportedly good job in Memphis, he found himself running a cigar stand in Omaha, where he played ball for the Union Pacific team, though more at shortstop and outfielder than as pitcher.

He married in Omaha on Christmas Day, 1883, and invited all the First Reds to witness the wedding. Under the headline “Caught on the Fly,” the Rules’ Knoxville Chronicle reported on Sneed’s obvious success. “Familiarly known as ‘Jack Sneed, the Curver’ … he was pitcher of the Knoxville Reds that won the Championship of the South. He is especially well known in this city, and all will be glad to learn that he is successful at everything he undertakes.”

But soon after that wedding, Sneed disappeared, leaving creditors to guess where he was—St. Louis, apparently—and he was arrested in 1884 for grand larceny of Pennsylvania Railroad property. The fact that the stolen property was some railroad ledger books may suggest there was something more complicated to the story, including what sounds like an allegation of bribery. An anonymous newspaper writer submitted a guarded warning about the old champion in late 1889: “There are several reasons why the Omaha team would be much better off without this man Sneed.”

He was later said to be captain of a team in New Orleans, and later still lived in Columbus, Ohio, perhaps still playing some, but seems to have died prematurely, probably before 1900.

James F. Rule, the newspaperman and left fielder, was a promising young newspaper editor and writer, likely the author of that item about Sneed’s success. In 1888, an unsigned editorial attributed to Rule angered the family of a city physician, leading to an attempt to ambush Rule later as he entered St. John’s Episcopal Church on a Sunday morning. Armed with both choir sheet music and a loaded pistol, Rule killed one of his assailants, but was severely wounded, himself. He seemed to recover, but died a few years later in the U.S.-occupied Philippines, at the age of 44, of an undisclosed illness that could have been related to his wound.

That same year, about a decade after he started with the Reds, the Reds’ second baseman, Martin Condon, was elected mayor of Knoxville. He was the first Catholic mayor of the city, a fact that may seem more remarkable in retrospect than it did at the time. Condon later left town and became a major kingpin of the national snuff-tobacco business, a multi-millionaire who only occasionally visited his hometown.

After the strange death of his Congressman father Leonidas Houk, a political boss who died of arsenic poisoning in an especially peculiar episode in 1891, handsome young Reds first baseman John C. Houk was elected to Congress, himself, serving four years. He was never the powerful politician his father had been, but remained a successful attorney, occasionally involved in local politics.

 

 

And Professor Ebenezer Alexander, the 1878 “president” of the Knoxville Reds, became a major figure in the history of sports internationally. Although small and never in robust health, Alexander was always fascinated with athletics, partly thanks to his study of the classics and the ancient games. His facility with the Greek language helped land him an enviable job as U.S. Ambassador to Greece, and he was on hand at the organization of the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. He’s remembered as the first financial donor to the Olympics, and the man who assured that the United States would be represented in those original games, which were otherwise a mostly European event. Alexander had taught at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before returning to his hometown, in poor health. He died in downtown Knoxville, at the Pryor Brown Livery Stable, in 1910. Because the Olympics had sputtered some in its early years, he never knew what a major institution the Games would become. He’s buried at Old Gray, not far from some of his teammates of ’79.

by Jack Neely