Salem Breakfast on Bikes: Salem's First Baseball Season in 1867 Culminated at the Fair

Tomorrow, Wednesday the 22nd, the Hearings Officer will analyze dual appeals on the improvements to the baseball field in Bush Park. The Staff Reports are brief in finding the objections in the appeal without merit. Willamette and the baseball club have lawyered up with a big Portland firm, and over the weekend the ping of metal bats in batting practice could be heard. The appeals, as they are designed to do, are delaying things and schedules are getting very compressed for both the Willamette season and any Marion Berries season. (Update: The Hearing is cancelled. See addendum below.)

Substantively, there's nothing new to say there, and it will be very surprising if the Hearings Officer gives any ground other than affirming the City decisions.

Instead, let's talk baseball history!

In some unrelated research a stray baseball item turned up.

Oregon City Enterprise, Sept. 14th, 1867

It discussed baseball games at the State Fair in 1867 and mentioned that the "Second Nine [of Oregon City] challenge[d] the Willamettes, of Salem, to play a match game during the State Fair."

It was older than anything I had previously remembered seeing, so I filed it away to research later.

But it was not necessary to go very far.

The Mill had an exhibit on the history of sports a decade ago. I missed it, and fortunately a summary is on the Mill's current website, "Boys of Summer: Baseball in the Mid-Willamette Valley."

They locate the origins of local baseball to 1867, the same year as the clipping.

Zooming out to a more regional perspective, a Seattle-area writer interested in the history of baseball just blogged about it also, "The Pioneer Base Ball Club and the Beginning of Northwest Baseball in the 1860s." The Portland origin was in 1866, and Salem followed the next year.

The State Fair game was wild. Imagine a baseball score of 92-25!

The Pioneers faced two teams at the State Fair. The opened against the Willamette Base Ball Club of Salem. The game got off to a shocking start when Edward Quackenbush of the Pioneers hit a rocket straight back to the Willamette pitcher, William Wythe, breaking his collar bone. It was only a momentary disruption, though. Wythe’s father was present and presumably a doctor because the Corvallis newspaper reported that his father set the bone, and William was back to cheer on this club less than an hour later. Unfortunately, his club was no match for the Pioneers and lost, 92 to 25.

Here's a contemporary note on it. "Wonder if there is not some easier game at which the Willamettes could play — say, pins, or marbles?" they said.

Oregon City Enterprise, Oct. 12th, 1867

There might be more to say later. Wythe appears to be a prominent doctor in early Salem and seems to have been involved in settling some questions about Willamette's ownership of land.

October 8th, 1869

September 27th, 1890

Addendum

On our current timeline, on the Bush Park baseball improvements the appeals have been withdrawn and the Hearing cancelled. So that matter appears now to be closed.

The old time story ripples out from the baseball and is very interesting!

Here is the Corvallis piece that talks about William Wythe's father. (The drive by horse carriage from Corvallis to Salem took most of the day! Here's a "turn out" carriage.)

Corvallis Weekly Gazette, October 12th, 1867

There is so much more than merely that the father is a physician.

The Rev. Dr. J. H. Wythe was President of Willamette University at this time! He also preached at First Methodist.

Oct. 2nd and Oct. 23rd, 1865

He rates a piece in the Oregon Encyclopedia, which focuses on his significance in starting the medical school. (While it says his term was 1865-1868, I read Gatke's Chronicles of Willamette to say 1865-1867. Any one year difference matters only as a footnote. Gatke mentions him many times in Chapter VIII, "Willamette of the Sixties." Gatkte pointedly notes he was anti-evolution, humorously.)

The son, William, was also a medical doctor and remained in Salem for a bit. When Joseph left Willamette, he was called to Portland to preach at a church there.

After a few years, the family returned to the greater San Francisco bay area. They're all buried in Oakland and the east bay may be the center for them. It is while living there that they appear to have claimed a good part of downtown Salem.

October 30th, 1875

December 25th, 1875

William's wife, Laura, was the daughter of William and Chloe Willson. Laura's sister, Francis, had married J. K. Gill, and during Chloe's final years, before she died in 1874, she lived with the Gills. The lawsuits are probably related to settling her estate.

Parcels for Marion Square, Willson Park, and even some of Willamette University all were involved in the suits. There were other private citizens and their lands involved also, a half-dozen or more individual suits. (At the moment it does not seem important to track down all of them.)

The problem, as I understand it, derived fundamentally from an earlier dispute. (And of course there is the prior dispossession of the Kalapuya. There are layers of weirdness in our chains of possession!) From the old Online Salem History now at the Mill:

After the Donation Land Claim Law of 1850 passed, conflicts arose between the Willsons and the Oregon Institute board over the title to the land. Under the 1850 law, the 640 acre property belonged jointly to both William and Chloe. Although Dr. Willson was bound to the trustees to administer the land for the University, Chloe was not, and insisted that her legal right to the land be recognized. The dispute was resolved in 1854, when the Willsons and the trustees reached a compromise. A line was drawn splitting the property in half along State Street; the 320 acres to the south would belong to the Institute, and the 320 to the north would belong to Chloe. Throughout the disagreement, Dr. Willson apparently remained a member of the board of trustees, and Chloe continued teaching at the Oregon Institute, and later at Willamette University.

Not all of the particulars of each suit are identical, but a unifying thread appears to be that land that was in Chloe's half seems to have been sold without explicit legal acknowledgement from Chloe. Not exactly fully "out from under her," but probably a little dodgy. Chloe may also not have been diligent about the details of property transactions she herself initiated. The Statesman in 1875 had disparaged the Gill/Wythe group as "grasping heirs," suggesting there was a shakedown, but there seems to have been at least some substance to the complaints.

Since Margaret Jewett Bailey gives us reason to think William Willson accused her of fornication as a way to shame her and force a marriage before Chloe came along, it is very possible that Willson in life and in his estate arrangements did not respect his wife either. Contemporary references avow his probity, but he is a suspect fellow!