Photos Of The 1876 Brown Stockings

Your 1876 Brown Stockings

As I mentioned yesterday, Paul Batesel sent me the cropped Packy Dillon photo.  He also sent me these pictures, cropped from the above team photo of the 1876 Brown Stockings.  The individual pictures look fantastic and Paul did a great job with them.  Much thanks to him for passing them along.

John Clapp

George Washington Bradley

Herman Dehlman

Joe Battin

Mike McGeary

Denny Mack

Ted McGinley

Ned Cuthbert

Lipman Emmanuel Pike

Bad Dickey Pearce

Paul also sent me the cropped photo of Joe Blong but it was in a different format and I haven't bothered to change it into a jpg yet.  So you don't get to see that.  Sorry.

Also of note, and something that I never considered until just now, the inclusion of McGinley in the photo means that the photo was taken after June 23, 1876, when McGinley joined the team.  For some reason, I always just assumed that the photo was taken at the beginning of the season.

Again, big hat tip to Paul.  These pictures are just great.      

And I'm Not Done With The Subject Just Yet

Just before the above game commenced, the St. Louis Brown Stockings, in full uniform, appeared on the field. They had gone to Cumminsville, to play the Blue Stockings, but it seems that the latter had made arrangements for the game to come off to-day. The game, however, is off, and the Browns will, we understand, play the Ludlows to-day, and the Reds to-morrow. After practicing a while on the Blue Stocking Grounds, during which Dehlman, first baseman, had the misfortune to lose his pocket book, containing a sum of money and a railroad ticket, which he would like to have returned, the Browns retired in disgust, and visited the grounds of the Reds, where they were provided with pleasant seats to witness the game. Cuthbert, the center-fielder, was pressed into service to umpire the game, and gave perfect satisfaction.-[Cincinnati Gazette]

-St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 20, 1875

I think this is a rather amusing story about Herman Dehlman and also gives you a different view of what life on the road was like for a club during the period. It appears that the Browns had scheduled the game with the Blue Stockings on September 16. Also note that there is no mention of a game with Philadelphia.

C. Orrick Bishop And The Brown Stockings

Bishop had played amateur baseball while attending Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and pursuing legal studies in Louisville. His playing career ended when he opened a law practice in St. Louis during 1867, but Bishop remained active in promoting local amateur baseball. This long-time love for the sport persuaded Bishop to accept a major role in the development of the Brown Stockings. Team officials, impressed by his intimate knowledge of the game, appointed him as managing director and entrusted him with recruiting players for the team. Approaching this mission very seriously, Bishop spent a month away from his thriving legal practice to travel the East Coast in search of ballplayers. He focused his efforts in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, cities whose teams had previously traveled to St. Louis.

Bishop signed three players-shortstop Dickey Pearce, right fielder Jack Chapman, and first baseman Herman "Dutch" Dehlman-from the roster of the 1874 Brooklyn Atlantics. While in Brooklyn, Bishop also secured the services of Lipman Pike, who had played the previous season with the Harford Dark Blues...

Bishop discovered the rest of his starting nine in and around Philadelphia...(specifically among) the Easton, Pennsylvania, amateur team...

Bishop had put together a fine team, and the Brown Stockings' shareholders commended him for performing his duty "in a manner highly satisfactory to his confreres in the new venture." But by hiring a starting lineup of ballplayers born in either New York or Pennsylvania, Bishop had risked alienating some sectors of St. Louis society that yearned to see the city represented by homegrown talent.

-From Before They Were Cardinals

I think the interesting question here is who specifically made the decision to bring in the "Atlantic/Easton professionals." While I had always assumed that it was a collective decision by the Brown Stockings board, Jon David Cash makes it sound here as if it was Bishop's decision alone. As managing director, he was tasked by the board to put together the team and he then proceeded to head East to sign the players. Certainly he had the support of the board in this decision to bring in "outsiders" but a great deal of credit must be given to Bishop.

This decision to bring in the Eastern players was a watershed event in the history of St. Louis baseball and had a tremendous impact on the future of the game in St. Louis. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the Brown Stockings' board was made up of several members of the Union Base Ball Club, whose former president was Asa Smith, the visionary and forward-thinking modenizer of the St. Louis game in the 1860's. Certainly Smith had had a tremendous impact on the thinking of his fellow club members who sat on the Brown Stockings' board and I believe that if Smith had been alive in 1875 he would have approved of bringing in the Eastern players.

Remembrance Of Things Past

We were very proud of our St. Louis Browns, and equally jealous of the Chicago White Sox. One never gets this partisanship out of the blood. Only last Saturday the sculptor, Ruckstull, now sixty-eight, and sunk deep in the hollow of a library leather chair from which he was freely reading Montaigne's archaic French, paused at some mention of memory and said: "What a heaven sent gift memory is!" And then, with an accusing challenge, "Can you name the whole nine of the first St. Louis league team when they won that first series from Chicago in 1874?"

And trying to beat each other to it, we alternated and interfered and reached a flushed crescendo in a run of competing explosions, telling: "Bradley, pitch; Miller, catch; Dehlman, Bannon, Hogue, on bases; Dickey Pierce at short; and in the field? Cuthbert, Chapman, and-and Haight."

But we couldn't remember Chicago. We remembered the whiskers on some of those Lake Front athletes, as luxuriant as those now worn by the Cough Drop Brothers. And all the time the sculptor was commanding attention with a hand on which the hypnotic feature was an ossified contusion of the first phalange of the little finger, pitched to him on our old railroad nine of that epoch.

-From The Print of My Remembrance

Augustus Thomas (pictured above as a young man), author of The Print of My Remembrance, was a playwright and journalist who was born in St. Louis in 1857. As a young man, he worked on the railroad in St. Louis which explains the reference to "our old railroad nine."

I guess I should point out the irony of discussing how wonderful a thing memory is and then not being able to remember correctly the year the Brown Stockings joined the NA. Thomas and Frederick Ruckstull also misidentified the Brown Stockings starting nine. "Bannon" was Joe Battin and I don't know who "Haight" was but the name they were looking for was Lip Pike.