'Baseball in the Berkshires' Tells New Stories at Lenox's Ventfort Hall
A news clipping about Jackie Jackson, who had a tryout with the Class AA Pittsfield Senators, is displayed alongside a photo of Mabel Joyce, who played on the varsity baseball team at Lenox Memorial in the spring.
And he still is getting contributions from visitors to Baseball in the Berkshires: A County's Common Bond.
"This woman went to the exhibit we have in Great Barrington, she's from Lenox," Moore said as he showed off exhibits in the traveling museum's summer residency at Ventfort Hall.
"She said, 'My grandfather not only played with Babe Ruth but was his roommate on his first team in Baltimore.' And you go, 'Yeah, sure.' "
But that museum-goer had the receipts, which now form the core of one of many displays on view throughout the Ventfort Hall Gilded Age Mansion and Museum on Walker Street.
It turned out she had been challenged on the piece of her family's history when she was in high school and wrote to her grandfather to supply some backup, as Moore tells the story.
That letter, along with newspaper clippings about the Lenox resident's grandfather prove her family's connection to one of the most famous people of the 20th century.
"Jack Dunn, who was the owner of the Baltimore Orioles [in the minor leagues] … said, 'I want you to be the roommate of this young guy I have coming up from industrial school because of your moral values and everything, maybe you can set this guy straight,' " Moore said with a laugh, alluding to the fact that, among many things Ruth later became famous for is the Yankees' use of one of pro sports' first "morality clauses" in 1922.
Fittingly, there are nods to Lenox lore throughout the summer 2024 iteration of Baseball in the Berkshires, which first sprung up in a temporary home just up the road at Herman Melville's Arrowhead in 2015 and has since set up shop in locations throughout the county (and one stop last year in Guilderland, N.Y.) over the last decade.
One local legend recognized in the exhibit is Dave Gunn, who became the first known Black coach of a county high school team when he coached the baseball squad at Lenox Memorial High School in 1943.
Gunn's story dovetails with the main theme of this summer's exhibit, titled, "Breaking Windows and Breaking Barriers: The Obscured History of Baseball in the Berkshires."
The theme is explored in detail in a second-floor hallway of the mansion, where photos, explanatory text, newspaper clippings and memorabilia bring to life two currents of social change as reflected in the game and in the county: the fight for racial integration and the battle to gain opportunities and recognition for female athletes.
One player who features prominently in the former is Frank Grant — born in Pittsfield, raised in Dalton and Williamstown and inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 2006 as "perhaps the best of the African-American players who played in organized baseball in the 1880s," according to the Hall of Fame website.
"He turns up playing for Williamstown independents and some of the teams up there," Moore said. "He then goes to Plattsburgh, N.Y., to take a job at a hotel, but there's a semi-pro team there he plays for and gets called by Meriden, Conn., which was a professional team. They only last about half a year. That's when he goes to Buffalo.
"In Buffalo he plays, but he has to wear wooden shin guards to protect him from the white players who were discriminating against him. The white players complain to the owners, and what, eventually, what you see is the owners getting together and voting the Black players out. So, [Grant] quits and goes to the Cuban Giants."
Grant played for the Negro Leagues' Giants in 1889 and most of the 1890s, earning fame.
Sol White, a teammate, manager, executive, writer and Hall of Famer integral to Negro Leagues story said of Grant, "In those days, Frank Grant was the baseball marvel. His playing was a revelation to his fellow teammates, as well as the spectators. In hitting he ranked with the best and his fielding bordered on the impossible."
In 1897, Grant and some of his former Giants teammates founded a splinter team dubbed the "Cuban X-Giants" and settled it in North Adams a year later, giving it the distinction of the fourth professional baseball team to call the Berkshires home, according to Moore's research.
Meanwhile, girls and women also played the game — and fought for recognition — on the county's baseball diamonds.
Through newspaper archives from the time, Moore tells the story of an 1879 visit from the barnstorming Blue Stockings of Philadelphia and Red Stockings of New York.
"This was a perfect example of two female teams coming to Pittsfield to play and got harassed by men, so much that the police had to be called," Moore said. "Once they were called, a second group of men laid down in the baselines and wouldn't let them by."
Nevertheless, women pioneered in the game, forming a Pittsfield High School girls baseball team in 1889 and town and company teams throughout the county through the turn of the century.
And, just like the legendary Satchel Paige pitched in an exhibition at Wahconah Park in 1954, some of the big names in women's baseball entertained Berkshire County audiences.
"Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig [in 1931], and then she signed with the Chattanooga team," Moore said. "She was supposed to pitch for Troy's Garage and [for] Copake, N.Y., [in 1934 in West Stockbridge]. … But she got in a car accident in Stockbridge and couldn't make the games."
On the other hand, the first woman to play professional baseball, Rhode Island's Lizzie Murphy, did bring her Lizzie Murphy's All-Stars to Adams in 1926, four years after she became the first woman to play in a game against Major Leaguers at Fenway Park.
Baseball in the Berkshires' "Breaking Windows and Breaking Barriers" exhibit is on view at Ventfort Hall Gilded Age Mansion and Museum through Labor Day and is included with the price of admission to the turn of the century "cottage."
"This is the first venue we've been at that charges [since Arrowhead]," Moore said. "So it's something new. We'll find out."
Tags: baseball, historical,
