The Boston Red Stockings Organizational Meeting

January 20, 1871, Parker House, Boston — Ivers Whitney Adams had a specific plan and friends with the money to back it up—if he could secure their help. He was certainly the instigator behind Boston’s having a representative baseball team if there was to be an organized “league” in 1871. Adams called his Congress, State, and Washington Street merchant pals to the famed Parker House for a luncheon meeting on Friday, January 20, 1871. His special guests were Harry and George Wright, formerly the star brothers of the Cincinnati Red Stockings, whom Adams saw play in 1869 and 1870 in Boston as they traversed the country beating nearly all opponents.

Adams’s urgings and comments to his well-heeled friends were in the Boston Journal and Boston Daily Advertiser the next day, while other papers had shorter accounts. Even the New York Clipper printed Adams’s speech in its January 28 issue.1 He was simply asking them to contribute to a $15,000 stock-buying venture that would back his dream baseball team’s creation and foundation.

The local press printed a few names, those who were elected to front-office positions, but it was left to historian George V. Tuohey, 26 years later, to name everyone who got a Parker House invite in his iconic A History of the Boston Base Ball Club.2

In 1948 Harold Kaese’s book The Boston Braves, An Informal History was published as part of the famous G.P. Putnam and Sons baseball series. On page 5 he listed Adams’s wealth roster again, but not without error. He wrote that an F.G. Welsh became a stockholder. There was no such person, but on hand was Canton’s affable Frank George Webster, “The Dean of State Street.” The various newspapers, historian Tuohey, and finally sportswriter Kaese each mixed up an initial or two but a little research has easily corrected those minor glitches.

Though not quite all at the apex of their final wealth as 1871 began, it was an extremely impressive bunch that Adams, 33, had gathered.

John Adams Conkey (1839-1903) was an orphan by 1852. His father, John Q.A. Adams Conkey, was in the crockery business, but died in 1843; his mother, Martha Howe (Bird) Conkey, passed in 1851. The family physician, Dr. Henry E. Townsend, was Conkey’s guardian and sent him to the finest schools. As a young man Conkey clerked for Tuckerman-Townsend, noted tea merchants. Then he dealt in the China Trade for August Heard, later becoming a customs broker and forwarder, estate trustee, and bank notary. A talented thespian, he was a Newton Player and a member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Conkey was chosen as team vice president and became the Red Stockings’ second president in 1872, when Adams returned full-time to his businesses and outdoor sporting interests.

Harrison Gardner (1841-1899) served in the Civil War as a lieutenant in the 45th Massachusetts Regiment. Gardner worked at several prosperous firms before being named a partner of commercial merchants Smith, Hogg, and Gardner. Among his many club memberships around the city were those of the Longwood Club and the Boston Athletic Association. He was the Red Stockings’ first treasurer.

George Henry Burditt (1832-1877), was the fifth of six children of grocer William Burditt (and Eliza Welch) of Charlestown. His father died when George was five but he worked his way up into a comfortable life as a clerk, accountant, bookkeeper and by 1870, a real estate broker. He was not among the richest of the Parker House invitees, but was voted on to the Red Stockings Board of Directors that first season and was the club’s treasurer the second year. He remained a director for most of the Reds five-year existence. From the late 1860s Burditt lived in rural West Roxbury and later East Somerville where cancer took his life at age 35.

John Franklin Mills (1823-1876, born in Vermont) was the oldest of those at the lunch and maybe the most “strategic” invitee since he was the partner of Harvey D. Parker, who started the Parker House eatery/hotel. Mills worked for Parker as a waiter at a small restaurant at age 21, proved his considerable worth and ability, and when Parker opened the Parker House, Mills was the main operator. He continued in that job until just before his death.

Eben Dyer Jordan (1823-1895, born in Maine) was likely the wealthiest man at the table at that time. Despite growing up on a farm, he partnered with Benjamin L. Marsh to create the famed Jordan-Marsh retail store in the 1860s. In 1865 his store, woolen mills, and printing company were worth more than an unprecedented $27 million in annual revenues.3

Henry Lillie Pierce (1825-1896) was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, a two-term US congressman in the 1870s, and was elected mayor of Boston in 1873 and 1878 before going into the insurance business. His first employment was with the Walter Baker & Co., a chocolate producer, which he took over by 1854 (when Baker died) and of which he was the sole proprietor the rest of his life. He was a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts and had membership in several other clubs including the posh Algonquin Club. Among the dozens of causes he was involved in, one was to repeal the state and national law that prevented the enlistment of “colored soldiers” into the State militia or US Army.

Edward Augustus White (1825-1891) was in the clothing and real-estate businesses. He became an alderman and was on the Boston Common Council and Water Board, and became a fire department commissioner.

James Horatio Freeland (1827-1902) partnered early on with his brother C.W. Freeland in men’s clothing manufacturing in Worcester. He later shared ownership in three other companies, one supplying cloth goods for the Union Army in the Civil War. The Great Fire of 1872 burned Freeland out but soon he rebuilt in the form of the Continental Clothing House with Silas W. Loomis on Washington Street. He was a member of the Ancient and Honorable Society, the Central Club, Boston Art Club, and Commercial Club, among many fraternal groups.

Frank George Webster (1841-1930) was likely the richest of the group when claimed by death. As a young man he was a bookbinder, wallpaper clerk, and bank teller before his service in the Civil War. Postwar, he was in on the ground floor at the opening of Kidder, Peabody & Co. Eventually he became known as the “Dean of State Street,” where over the years he amassed his considerable fortune. Webster’s summer home at Squam Lake, New Hampshire, is on the National Register and he owned various Canadian preserves and clubs and was a member of the exclusive Union and Algonquin Clubs and The Country Club of Brookline.

Charles Hunt Porter (1843-1911) became the third president of the Red Stockings in 1873.4 Conkey, like Adams, went back to real business endeavors after one season of baseball activity. Colonel Porter, too, had fought in the Civil War (more than a dozen notable battles) and later became the first mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1889 when the town became a city. Prior to that he was also park commissioner and organized the Quincy Actives Base Ball team and played on it in the 1860s. During his entire life he was involved in politics in the “City of Presidents,” taking seats on the school board and fire department, and he formed the Quincy Water Co.

Nicholas Taylor Apollonio (1843-1911, born in Brooklyn, New York) was not listed as being at the Parker House but became the fourth Boston Red Stockings president (1874). His father was Italian immigrant Nicholas Alessandro Apollonio, a printer and City of Boston registrar for 40 years. With special permission, young Nick entered Boston English High School at age 11. He was an accountant and clerk by trade and directed operations for the Great Falls Manufacturing Co. for 35 years. Likely the first Italian to be connected with big-time baseball, he eventually became a Winchester resident and was involved with the Winchester Savings Bank, and always cared deeply about the town’s well-being. As Red Stockings president in 1876, Apollonio oversaw the transition from the chaotic National Association to the much more “organized” National League, but even more crucial to Boston fans, the sudden departure of the “Big Four” of Albert Spalding, Deacon White, Ross Barnes, and Cal McVey for Chicago in 1876. Arthur H. Soden joined the Red Stockings toward the close of that first NL season in 1876 and took over as president before the 1877 campaign began.

Richard “Dixie” Tourangeau was the creator/author of the “Play Ball!” wall calendar for Tide-Mark Press from 1981 to 2005, for which he wrote more than 250 player biographies. As the 21st century began he felt an urge to know more about 19th century teams and players. While becoming comfortable with them he was credited with finding the gravesites of Mort and Fraley Rogers for the Biographical Committee and confirming those of Dave Birdsall (cleaning his headstone) and John Dickson McBride (unmarked). Dixie, SABR 1981, lives a mile from both Fenway Park and where the South End Grounds and Huntington Avenue Grounds were located. While researching the Red Stockings creation he realized that in 1870, Ivers Whitney Adams lived a third of a mile from his house, in the Highlands, now the Mission Hill section of Boston. He has written for The National Pastime and biogs and game accounts for the SABR Braves Field and County Stadium books.

 

Sources

The sources for material on these men is largely gleaned from their obituaries, though some other sources have been consulted as well. The sources are listed here, alphabetically, by each man.

APOLLONIO: Winchester (Massachusetts) Star, April 7, 1911. See also Nemec, David, The Rank and File of 19th Century Major League Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2012), 285.

BURDITT: Boston Globe, September 18, 1926.

CONKEY: The New-England Historical Genealogical Register, Vol. LIX. Memoirs, Section 1903 Deaths (supplement to April 1905), lxxi. (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1905).

FREELAND: Supreme Council of the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite, “In Memoriam, Illustrious Brother,” Proceedings of the Annual Session Held in Boston, June 26, 1903 (Boston: Massachusetts Council of Deliberation, 1903), 31-33.

GARDNER: The (Brookline, Massachusetts) Chronicle, February 18, 1899.

JORDAN: Boston Herald, November 16, 1895.

MILLS: Boston Globe, April 10, 1876, and Boston Daily Advertiser, April 10, 1876.

PIERCE: Boston Globe, December 18, 1896.

PORTER: Quincy (Massachusetts) Patriot, August 12, 1911, and Boston Globe, August 11, 1911.

WEBSTER: Boston Globe, January 23, 1930.

WHITE: Boston Evening Transcript, May 14, 1891.

 

Notes

1 New York Clipper, January 21, 1871: 338.

2 George V. Tuohey, A History of the Boston Base Ball Club (Boston: M.F. McQuinn & Co., 1897), Part III, 62.

3 It has been difficult to determine whether or not this referred to annual revenues or net worth, though mentions of the sum appear to suggest annual revenues, which would be truly astonishing.

4 In George V. Tuohey’s book, he begins Chapter V, “The Club’s Presidents,” by saying (his information came from J.C. Morse of the Boston Herald) that all five Red Stockings presidents were then alive and living in Boston. Tuohey via Morse writes that Charles H. Porter was the third president and held office for two seasons. Then Nicholas T. Apollonio became the fourth president for both 1875 and 1876. The years attributed to each man were incorrect. The New York Clipper of December 27, 1873, printed a letter from “President” Porter on the subject of professionalism in the Association. It was dated December 15 and appeared on the bottom of the sixth column of page 306. In the very next column, at the bottom, was a one-paragraph item, “Boston Baseball Association,” which gave the “recent vote” for officers for the Club. Apollonio was elected president and Porter became a director for the coming 1874 season. Sometime between December 16 and Christmas Eve the vote had taken place and Porter was no longer president.