The Brattleboro Historical Society celebrated its 40th anniversary on Nov. 12 with an open house, a birthday cake, and a presentation by baseball historian and memorabilia collector Dana Sprague.
Sprague, a Brattleboro Union High School graduate who played for the Colonels when they won the 1978 state baseball championship, has one of the largest private collections of Vermont baseball artifacts in existence. He brought some of that collection, along with plenty of stories of the long history of baseball in Brattleboro, to share with the Historical Society for its birthday party.
It's been often said that Brattleboro has always been a baseball town, and Sprague says he has tried to do his part to chronicle its rich history here, and in Vermont at large.
“There's so much history that goes back to the 1860s, going back to the Civil War when baseball really became popular,” he said.
Ernie Johnson, and other pros
According to Sprague's research, there have been nine Brattleboro natives that have played professional baseball. They are John Foley (born 1857), Thomas Guiheen (born 1882), Ernie Johnson (born 1924), Pete Beebe (1935), Paul Beebe (born 1942), John Henry Williams (born 1968), Chris Duffy and Brad Baker (both born in 1980), and Jeff Dixon (born 1981).
Ernie Johnson is the only one of that group who played Major League Baseball in the post-1900 era, mostly as a relief pitcher in the 1950s with a lifetime record of 40-23 with an earned run average of 3.77 in 273 games. He and Hank Aaron share the distinction of being the only people who served in the Braves organization in all three cities that the team played in - Boston, Milwaukee, and Atlanta.
A 1942 graduate of Brattleboro High School, Johnson didn't reach the big leagues until 1950 due to a three-year stint with the Marines during World War II and a long apprenticeship in the minors. He was a key player in the Braves' victory over the New York Yankees in the 1957 World Series.
After his playing career ended in 1960, he eventually became a broadcaster for the team and had a long and distinguished career before retiring from full-time duty in 1989. He continued announcing on a part-time basis until 2000 and called a total of more than 4,100 Braves games over four decades.
Spague, a good friend of the Johnson family, said “Ernie always had great connection with Brattleboro and came back almost every year to visit. I loved to listen to his stories.”
Johnson, who died in 2011, may yet receive one more honor. He is a finalist on this year's ballot for the Baseball Hall of Fame's 2023 Ford Frick Award, which is presented to an active or retired broadcaster who, according to the Hall, has demonstrated a “commitment to excellence, quality of broadcasting abilities, reverence within the game, popularity with fans, and recognition by peers.”
The other finalists on the 2023 ballot are familiar ones to folks who follow baseball - Dave Campbell, Joe Castiglione, Gary Cohen, Jacques Doucet, Tom Hamilton, Jerry Howarth, Pat Hughes, Duane Kuiper, and Steve Stone. Johnson is the only posthumous honoree on the ballot.
The winner will be announced at baseball's annual Winter Meetings in San Diego on Dec. 7. The award itself will be presented during the Hall of Fame induction weekend on Cooperstown, N.Y., next July.
Reclaiming lost history
Besides talking about Ernie Johnson, Sprague also focused some attention on a long-forgotten name from the 19th century on that list of Brattleboro ball players who ended up playing one game in the major leagues - John Foley.
Foley was the oldest of seven children and grew up on Frost Street when it was a rough-and-tumble Irish neighborhood. Sprague said the earliest mention of Frost playing organized baseball was is 1875, when the 17-year-old graduate of Brattleboro High School pitched for the Fisk Juniors. Foley later played on a team sponsored by the Estey Organ Company before he was part of a new team called the Brattleboro Baseball Club in 1877.
In a Fourth of July game in 1881 against Keene, New Hampshire, Foley was Brattleboro's starting pitcher and the left-hander struck out 16 batters. Soon, the Brattleboro team was playing other town teams, as well as collegiate teams, around New England and Foley was developing a reputation as one of the top pitchers in the region.
Foley made his professional baseball debut with the Quincy, Illinois baseball club as a pitcher, outfielder, and second baseman in 1884. He compiled a 10-5 record before the team had to disband due to financial difficulties. He then pitched for teams in Keokuk, Iowa and Hannibal, Missouri to finish out the 1884 season and played the 1885 season for the Hannibal Nationals.
His one and only game in the major leagues came on Sept. 18, 1885. The Providence (R.I.) Grays, the National League's champions in 1884, were in the midst of a terrible slump, having won just four of their previous 27 games. The Grays were playing in St. Louis that day and desperately needed a pitcher for their two regular hurlers were struggling with arm problems. The Grays signed Foley, but he had dismal game as the last-place St. Louis Maroons won, 7-3.
The Grays kept losing that season, and Foley never played in another game. The Grays folded after the 1885 season, and Foley seemingly disappeared after that. He never returned to Brattleboro. The last known mention of him came in April 2, 1909 in The Sporting News.
Under an Athol, Mass., dateline, it reported that “John Foley, 25 years ago a noted base ball pitcher, and for many years believed to have been murdered in Chicago, is hale and hearty a man as lives to-day. His sister, Mrs. John Carney, of this town, to-day received a letter from her brother, who she had mourned as dead. He is living in Peoria, Ill.”
Sprague said it took four years of research and sleuthing to track down Foley's story. He and other baseball historians have yet to find any other accounts about Foley or when he actually died. All we know, according to baseball-reference.com, is that he made one appearance in a major league ball game, where he pitched eight innings, struck out two batters, and was responsible for four of the seven runs that scored in a 7-3 loss.
Island Park and Stolte Field
The center of the baseball universe in Brattleboro in the 1910s and 1920s was Island Park, the entertainment complex that sat between Hinsdale and Brattleboro and drew huge crowds not just for ball games, but for pageants, political speeches, dances, and other events.
Sprague said the baseball field at Island Park saw plenty of action as town teams from around Windham County played there, as well as visiting teams elsewhere in New England. One game, against Keene, drew more than 3,200 spectators.
“Any team that had a train ticket to Brattleboro found their way to Island Park,” said Sprague.
The construction of the Vernon Dam led to a series of spring floods that gradually ate away at Island Park, and the disastrous flood of 1927 washed away most of its buildings and its pavilion. That was the end of baseball there.
By the 1930s, baseball was played on the south end of town, on the site of the former Valley Fairgrounds. As part of the Works Progress Adminstration's projects around Vermont during the Roosevelt administration, a wooden grandstand was built at the site in the late 1930s. Completed in 1940, Stolte Memorial Field - named for Diedrich “Dede” Stolte, a longtime coach and physical education instructor at Brattleboro High School - would become the home for all levels of baseball for the next eight decades.
The wooden grandstand burned down in the fall of 1946, and a concrete and steel grandstand - the one that still stands today on the field - was built as its replacement and opened in time for the 1947 baseball season.
That grandstand has been closed to spectators since 2017 as the structure awaits repairs to modernize the seating and make it handicapped accessible. The hope is that these needed repairs will happen soon.
The Northern League
Another great period for baseball in Brattleboro came in the 1940s when it was part of the Northern League, a semipro league based mostly in Vermont, New York, and western New Hampshire. Sprague said 62 future major leaguers got their start in the Northern League.
The Brattleboro Maples joined the Northern League in 1940 and they won the league championship in 1949. “That was the heyday for baseball in Brattleboro,” said Sprague.
But the Maples would disband after the 1950 season. The rise of television and rules changes which prevented college players from participating in semipro leagues sounded the death knell for the Northern League.
There was a second version of the Northern League that started up in 1979, and the Brattleboro Maples were reborn, but it never quite rose to the level of the 1940s version.
College baseball
Sprague said his latest baseball history project is tracking down how many Bratlteboro natives have played Division I college baseball, the highest level in the collegiate game.
“It's really an elite honor to make a Division I baseball team,” he said. “The competition is intense.”
He has compiled a list of 17 players so far: Leif Bigelow, Ryan Brooks, Seth Christmas, Jeff Dixon, Chad Emery, John Galanes, Jeff Henry, Matt Henry, Pete LaFlamme, Jamie McAuliffe, David McGinn, Brian Meyer, Phil Natowich, Denny Robinson, Donny Robinson, Derek Root, Dan Shield, Heath Squires, and Frankie Taylor.
Most of that group played at the University of Vermont, which had a Division I baseball program until it was discontinued in 2009.
That's where Taylor, who Sprague called “probably one of the greatest athletes to come out of Brattleboro,” went to school. Sprague said Taylor, a 1941 graduate, played four varsity sports for UVM - baseball, football, basketball, and track - lettered in all four sports, and captained three of those teams. He had the talent to play professional baseball but chose not to. Instead, Taylor served in the Navy during World War II and was an engineer and a high school coach in Massachusetts.
The most recent member of that group is Bigelow, who was a pitcher at the University of Connecticut before transferring to the University of Maine. Sprague said Bigelow just graduated from Maine, but still has one more year of collegiate eligibility, so he is attending East Tennessee State and working on a master's degree. He plans to pitch for East Tennessee in the spring.
For more about Brattleboro's baseball history, the Historical Society had posted a recording of Sprague's talk at archive.org/details/brattleboro-baseball-history.