The Beachville Game

Adam Ford and his wife, the former Jane Cruttenden, ca 1872. Seated center is Jane’s father Lauriston Cruttenden, one of the early settlers of St. Marys. Ford’s marriage into the respected and influential family provided an immediate boost to both his social standing and his political aspirations. (St. Marys Museum and R. Lorne Eedy Archives, St. Marys, Ontario)

 

Baseball in Canada has a deeply rooted history. We know of “a game of base ball” in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1793,1 as well as baseball-related games in the 1830s and 1840s in such diverse areas as Victoria, Manitoba’s Red River Settlement, southwestern Ontario, and Nova Scotia.2 During these decades, and the 1850s, the game’s evolution in Canada paralleled that in the United States, as more organization and structure developed, and rules of play were formalized. The first teams were formed in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1854, and in London the next year. In 1860 the first international match was played in what is now Niagara Falls, Ontario, between the Burlington club of Hamilton and the Queen City club of Buffalo.3 And Canadian teams have been part of Organized Baseball’s structure since the entry of Guelph and London into the International Association in 1877. But it was a game apparently played in a farmer’s field behind a blacksmith’s shop, and not described until nearly 50 years afterward, that put Canada on the baseball map. Referred to today as the Beachville game, it has been celebrated by both the Canadian postal service and the Royal Canadian Mint, yet it remains a subject of debate among historians.

BACKGROUND

Beachville is a small farming community in Zorra Township, Oxford County, in southwestern Ontario, roughly 90 miles southwest of Toronto.4 It was on the family farm just outside Beachville that Adam Ford was born to Irish immigrant parents in 1831. After local schooling, he travelled to Cobourg, Ontario, and Victoria College, where he studied medicine, obtaining his medical accreditation in 1855.5 A subsequent job search took him to St. Marys, a mere 25 miles northwest of his family home (and now the home of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum).

Seemingly comfortable with his familiar surroundings, Ford settled in St. Marys as the local physician. He adopted a healthy and active lifestyle, befitting his profession, and became an enthusiastic advocate of both curling and horse racing, as well as maintaining the passion for baseball of his youth in Zorra Township.6 He was a man of zeal and initiative, immersing himself in community affairs and sports administration, in addition to his professional duties. His office was established in one of the downtown’s finest stone buildings.7 Personable and gregarious, he infiltrated the town’s higher social circles, aided somewhat by his marriage to the daughter of one of St. Marys’ most influential and respected citizens, eventually being elected mayor. He was popular and successful, in his personal life, his business, and in politics. But he had also acquired a fondness for alcohol, a weakness that led to his temporary undoing.

The doctor fell into the habit of hosting late-night drinking parties in his downtown office, earning the disapproval of both the conservative elements of the community generally and the burgeoning local temperance movement in particular. After one such evening’s festivities, a young man staggered into the street in obvious distress, claiming that Dr. Ford had poisoned him. Bizarrely, the man was a vocal temperance proponent. He later died, and Ford was held on suspicion of his murder. Ford spent time in jail, but was eventually released, primarily the result of lack of apparent motive, and was never formally tried or convicted. During the course of the investigations, an association was also revealed between the married Ford and a young woman of questionable repute. It was an altogether tawdry affair, and decidedly bad for business. In 1880 Ford decamped to Denver with his sullied reputation and his sons.

SPORTING LIFE

It was from Denver, on April 26, 1886, that Adam Ford penned a letter to the editor of the popular sporting weekly Sporting Life in Philadelphia. The letter was printed in the edition of May 5 under the heading “Very Like Base Ball – A Game of the Long-Ago Which Closely Resembled Our Present National Game.”8 In it, Ford describes in impressive (and surprising) detail a game played in his hometown of Beachville on June 4, 1838, and witnessed by a young Ford.

He recalls the day as a holiday, and that a passing detachment of Scottish volunteer soldiers stopped to view the proceedings. His memories include the names of many of the participating players and the location of the field within the town. He provides a layout of the diamond, and describes the equipment used, and their materials. The basic rules under which the game was played are outlined, as are the unwritten but apparently mutually understood responsibilities of batter and pitcher. Finally, Ford compares and contrasts his 1838 game with the more modern (1886) game, not surprisingly showing preference for the former.

The letter is an extraordinary feat of recall, particularly when one recognizes that Ford must have been only seven years old when he witnessed the game, and that nearly 50 years had passed between the witnessing and the writing. As historian Bill Humber has suggested, Ford’s account suffers not from lack of detail, but rather from the opposite: it’s almost too good to be true.9

INVESTIGATION

Perhaps not surprisingly, the letter was viewed with some skepticism. But the possibility of such a game piqued the interest and curiosity of Bob Barney, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University). As a sport historian, he adhered to the prevailing belief that when southwestern Ontario had been visited by waves of American migrants following the end of the Revolutionary War, migrants westbound in search of land and better opportunities in such areas as what are now Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, many of these migrants settled in Upper Canada, bringing with them their pastimes and recreations. He viewed a possible game in that area at that time as further validation of the belief, and decided to investigate.

With the assistance of one of his graduate students, Nancy Bouchier, Barney visited Beachville and its local museum. There, the two pored over everything they could find: the census records, the land records, the tax records, the geographical maps from the time, the headstone evidence, military histories. Everything they uncovered provided affirmation of Ford’s account. Men of those names were residents of the area, and were of an appropriate age. The purported owner of the blacksmith shop was listed, his shop was where it was stated to be, and behind his shop, where the game was said to have been played, was an open field.

Sources of Oxford County military history revealed the presence of the Third Oxford Regiment in the area in the summer of 1838,10 likely Ford’s passing spectators. Descriptions of the equipment were consistent with the homemade manufacturing methods of the time: the ball of yarn and calfskin, the club of cedar.11 The diamond layout described by Ford bears a striking resemblance to one shown in George Moreland’s Balldom,12 an early attempt at a history of the game; Moreland describes his “diamond” as “A Peculiar Shaped One Used in 1842,” a mere four years after the Beachville game. And with one important exception,13 the rules as set out by Ford were consistent with those codified in 1845 by members of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York.14

But perhaps the most telling feature of Ford’s account was the game’s date, June 4. By statute of Upper Canada, June 4 was indeed a holiday, Militia Muster Day, in recognition of the birthday of King George III. The day was to be set aside for military training and parades, much consumption of food and drink, and recreational pastimes of just such a nature as a game of baseball. Canadian historical artist Charles W. Jefferys described the festivities thus:

“The fourth of June, the birthday of King George III, was the most important holiday of the year in early Upper Canada. On that day, the annual muster of the militia was held. Every able-bodied male between the ages of eighteen and sixty was enrolled, and all were expected to turn out for the occasion. For most of them this annual muster was the only opportunity they had for receiving any instruction in military exercises. It was held in the most central or the most convenient place in each district; in an open field on the outskirts of the principal village, among the stumps of a forest clearing, or at a cross roads, known generally as ‘The Corners.’… Around the Training ground gathered the girls, the wives and mothers and children and old men, admiring or critical. The drill ended with three cheers for His Majesty. The warriors dispersed themselves among the houses of their neighbors. Many sought the tavern, the bar-room did the biggest trade of the year. There was a dinner for the officers and gentry, with a long toast list: toasts to the King, to the Duke of York, Commander-in-Chief, to the Army and Navy, to the Ladies, each accompanied by an appropriate sentiment, expressed in flowery language…. The day was made the occasion of wrestling matches, horse shoe pitching contests, or the settling of old scores by a fight, which frequently ended in a general melee with plenty of black eyes, bloody noses and sore heads, but with general satisfaction to all concerned.”15

Bouchier and Barney published their findings in 1988 in the Journal of Sport History.16 The article served (almost literally) to put Canada on the early baseball map. The Beachville game was celebrated by Canada Post in 1988 with the issuance of a stamp, and was featured on a silver coin issued by the Royal Canadian Mint in 2018 in celebration of 180 years of baseball in Canada. It was a watershed moment in Canada’s baseball history.

Or was it?

CREDIBILITY ISSUES

Despite the corroborative evidence supplied by the Bouchier and Barney paper, there are aspects of Adam Ford’s account that invite skepticism. In fact, the credibility of the event as a whole has been questioned by some historians, among them some of the most respected of baseball’s research community.

Researcher David Block is one who admits to needing further convincing. Block, an expert on bat and ball games, and baseball’s origins in particular, discusses the Beachville game in his book Baseball Before We Knew It.17 He finds Ford’s memory “prodigious,” particularly for a seven-year-old remembering 48 years after the fact. He would prefer a secondary reference, another account of the game from an independent source, before accepting its legitimacy: “The absence of direct corroboration that the game ever happened is probably the biggest reason for my doubts, but I don’t dismiss the possibility that Ford could have remembered witnessing some sort of baseball-like contest at Beachville as a child. However, I still maintain that, unless he was an extraordinary savant, it is virtually impossible for a chronic drinker to remember with uncanny specificity the rules, the precise dimensions, and the exact names of the participants of an event he witnessed 48 years earlier when he was but seven years of age.”18

Major League Baseball’s official historian, John Thorn, is somewhat more blunt in his assessment. In a documentary film, No Joy in Beachville, produced for the Canadian television network Sportsnet in 2015, Thorn likened the Ford tale to the Doubleday myth, terming it “all baloney.”19 He states: “My principal objection to Ford’s report is that it appeared in print nearly 50 years after the fact. In 1838 he would have been seven years old. The Beachville story, a game said to have been played in 1838 (with no contemporaneous reference) but recollected by Dr. Adam Ford almost 50 years later, may be filed with Abner Graves’ recollections of Abner Doubleday inventing the game … when Graves was five and Doubleday 19 or 20.”20

It should be noted as well that some Canadian sources have done the game’s credibility no service by overstating its significance. Misguided attempts at nationalistic one-upmanship have prompted the use of such phrases as “the first game ever played,” “pre-dates Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown,” and “pre-dates the first game played by the Knickerbocker Club, baseball’s first club.” Space does not permit discussion of the many flaws in these descriptions; suffice to say that statements that are demonstrably false do more harm than good.21

There are undoubtedly problems with Ford’s account, the most obvious the suspicious clarity of the recollection. It’s one thing to recall the names of some of the participants; after all, these families would have been among Ford’s neighbors when he was a child. It’s quite another to remember with exactitude such details as the distances between bases, distances that were likely not measured precisely to begin with. There are also identifiable errors. Although the game he claimed to have witnessed involved plugging (the practice of retiring a baserunner by hitting him with a thrown ball), and was therefore not the New York game, he does admit to having participated in a game played with that game’s harder ball upon his return home from his university studies. Since he obtained his medical degree in 1855, this would have been shortly thereafter. But the first game known to have been played in Canada under the New York rules does not appear until May of 1859.22 No matter their cause, the flaws in the 1886 account indicate that perhaps it is not quite so “too good to be true” as was first thought.

The delay between the 1838 witnessing of the game and the 1886 publication of its description seems less problematic. By 1886 Adam Ford was 55 years old. Memories, particularly fond ones, often prompt people of that age to share them in some way. Of greater import is a comparison with the writings of William Wheaton. Wheaton’s unsigned history, entitled “How Baseball Began – A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It,” was published in the San Francisco Examiner on November 27, 1887.23 In it, Wheaton describes the game as it was being played on the common areas of New York in the 1830s, and the founding of the Gotham Baseball Club (which he claimed to be the first) in 1837. It is noteworthy that Wheaton’s memories, published 50 years after the fact, have not been questioned on that issue as have been Ford’s.

As to a secondary source for the Beachville game, a smoking gun, it is unlikely that one will ever be found, and unreasonable to expect one will be. Why would a newspaper, for example, commit any of its presumably limited resources to the coverage of an event of so little importance as an informal bat and ball game played as part of holiday celebrations? Particularly if that event was considered in no way out of the ordinary? Nonetheless, there have in recent years been uncovered some documents providing additional support to the credibility of the Ford tale.

Two of the families mentioned in the Sporting Life account are Williams and Dolson. Author and historian Brian Dawe, in a post to MLB historian John Thorn’s Our Game blog, notes that both of these families are part of an extended family named Burdick.24 (Enoch Burdick was the owner of the pasture in which Ford’s game was said to have been played.)25 The Burdick family emigrated to the Beachville area in the late 1790s from Lanesborough, Massachusetts, the neighboring town to Pittsfield in Berkshire County. This is the same Pittsfield that enacted a 1791 bylaw prohibiting baseball play for fear of broken windows. The Burdicks and a number of other Berkshire families had accompanied Major Thomas Ingersoll (after whom the present-day town nearby is named) as Ingersoll set about assigning land to families for settlement. The movement of the families, and their accompanying social customs and traditions, provide a means by which baseball play became a part of recreational life in the Beachville area.26

Of more direct relevance to Dr. Ford’s account is the discovery by Canadian historian Bill Humber of a game played in Hamilton, Ontario (then Upper Canada), in 1819. The game was first mentioned in the Hamilton Times in 1874, but reproduced in the Woodstock Sentinel later that year.27 The full text of the Sentinel’s report is shown below.

 

 

The report records a Hamilton old-timer’s memories of what he refers to as Training Day, an alternate name for Militia Muster Day, in 1819. The old-timer describes the requisite military training in the morning, after which the fun began: fisticuffs and general belligerence, fueled by great quantities of potent drink. The “most jolly time” included as well the pursuit of various recreations, one of which was “the old style of base ball.” Note especially the date of the festivities: June 4 again, King George Ill’s birthday. Here is a record of another game of baseball of some form, again on the fourth of June, played 19 years before the Beachville game described by Dr. Ford. This report cannot be an attempt to verify, or substantiate, Ford’s account, as it was published in 1874, 12 years before the Sporting Life letter of 1886. It represents what is likely the strongest corroborative support discovered to date.

It is true that none of the evidence provided above constitutes definitive proof that the game happened. However, the recent discoveries, particularly the recurrence of the June 4 date known to have historical significance in Upper Canada, provide support for those aspects of Adam Ford’s letter already confirmed by the research of Bouchier and Barney. That a game of the type described should have been played in the Beachville area in 1838, and in Hamilton in 1819, fits nicely with the concept of the spread of migration following the Revolutionary War. Rather than being nurtured in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, and then exported to Canada as a finished product, we know that baseball evolved north of the border as it did south. If indeed those emigrating from the American Northeast to southwestern Ontario following the upheaval of the war, bringing with them the game’s rudimentary aspects and fundamental tenets, were responsible for sowing baseball’s seeds in the area, then the Beachville game could be considered the most substantial manifestation of early growth.

ANDREW NORTH is a retired developer of statistical software. He is a director of the Centre for Canadian Baseball Research and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal for Canadian Baseball. A SABR member since 1982, he lives in St. Marys, Ontario, where he maintains the research library at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

 

Notes

1 The Volunteer Review and Military and Naval Gazette, Vol. Ill No. 7, February 15, 1869. The 1790s seem to have been fertile ground for baseball references. It was in 1791 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that an ordinance was passed prohibiting baseball play. See John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 23. And it was in 1798 in Hampshire, England, that Jane Austen wrote of cricket and base ball in Northanger Abbey (again see Thorn, 23).

2 William Humber, Diamonds of the North (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapter 2.

3 Buffalo Morning Express, August 18, 1860.

4 Beachville is also only about five miles from both Ingersoll and Woodstock, two other sites of significant early baseball activity.

5 For more details on Ford’s youth, his time in St. Marys, and the unfortunate events leading to his departure, see Brian Martin, Baseball’s Creation Myth (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2013), chapter 4.

6 The London Free Press of August 13, 1869, describes a game between the visiting Tecumseh Club of London and the Young Atlantic Baseball Club of St. Marys. The box score shows the St. Marys center fielder as “Dr. Ford,” who would have been approaching his 38th birthday at the time.

7 Ford’s home, and the building that housed his business, still stand in St. Marys today.

8 For the complete text of Ford’s letter, see Nancy B. Bouchier and Robert Knight Barney, “A Critical Examination of a Source of Early Ontario Baseball: The Reminiscence of Adam E. Ford,” Journal of Sport History Vol. 15 No. 1, Spring 1988, 88-90, or Martin, Baseball’s Creation Myth, Appendix C.

9 Humber, 18.

10 Bouchier and Barney: 80.

11 Humber, 17.

12 See Bouchier and Barney: 82, and George L. Moreland, Balldom (New York: The Balldom Publishing Co., 1914), 10.

13 Ford’s rules include the use of plugging, or soaking, by which the baserunner could be retired by being hit by a thrown ball between bases. A feature of the early Massachusetts game, plugging was not part of the New York game played by the Knickerbockers and other early New York clubs.

14 Bouchier and Barney: 84.

15 Charles W. Jefferys, Training Day. https://www.cwjeff-erys.ca/training-day, accessed December 22, 2020.

16 Bouchier and Barney: 75-90.

17 David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 62-66.

18 Block, email correspondence with author, December 23, 2020.

19 https://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/mlb/theres-no-joy-in-beachville-the-true-story-of-baseballs-origin-2/, accessed December 23, 2020.

20 Thorn, email correspondence with author, December 23, 2020.

21 There is no first baseball game: Baseball evolved, it wasn’t born. Abner Doubleday was nowhere near Cooperstown in 1839, and had no involvement with baseball. And the Knickerbocker Baseball Club was not only not the first baseball club, it was not even the first baseball club in New York. For a good discussion of these and other misconceptions, see Thomas W. Gilbert, How Baseball Happened (Boston: David R. Godine, 2020), chapter 1.

22 New York Clipper, June 11, 1859.

23 https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/how-baseball-began-William-r-wheaton-tells-his-story-4b278edc172, accessed December 29, 2020.

24 https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/pittsfield-1791-and-beachville-1838-6b07d3f20497, accessed December 30, 2020.

25 Bouchier and Barney: 81.

26 As well, it fits nicely with Bob Barney’s general theory of baseball migration northward and westward in the years following the Revolutionary War.

27 Woodstock Sentinel, July 10, 1874.