Saturday, December 10, 2011

The Carr Place Nine

Carr Place nine play the Lucas Amateurs a game at the Union Grounds at 10 o'clock this morning.  
-St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 25, 1884


I mention this little tidbit about a Carr Place baseball club simply to note the tradition of ball-playing in the Carr Park neighborhood.  The original Carr Place nine was the Morning Star Club, who was playing town ball at Carr Park in the late 1850s, was introduced to the Regulation game by Merritt Griswold and played the Cyclones in the first match game in the history of St. Louis baseball.  The tradition of bat and ball games in the Carr Park neighborhood was almost thirty years old when the above game was played.    

2 comments:

Ted Yemm said...

Jeff,
where exactly is Carr Place?

Ted

Jeffrey Kittel said...

Carr St. runs parallel to MLK Dr. and the Carr Square neighborhood is kind of between Cass, MLK, 14th and Jefferson. I think that Carr Place is just another name for Carr Square and I use them interchangeably. The Morning Star guys all lived in the neighborhood, either on Carr, 15th or 16th street.

There's not an actual Carr Park anymore but there are a bunch of parks in the neighborhood. What is now Loretta Hill Park, which is at the corner of 14th and Carr, is, by my best guess, where the club played during the antebellum era or it's very close to it. Loretta Hill Park, I think, is just a remanent of the original Carr Park, which was between Biddle, Franklin (now MLK), 14th and 17th.