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(SPORTS--BASEBALL.) The earliest known images of Black baseball players in action. 4 stereoview photographs, each with a pair of matched 3 x 2 3/4-inch albumen photographs mounted on original 3 1/4 x 7-inch mounts with photographer's backmark and inventory list on verso; minor wear and foxing, additional manuscript captions on verso. Rochester, NY, images circa 1871
These photographs show an integrated group of young baseball players at the Western House of Refuge, a reform school in Rochester, NY. Taken circa 1871, they are thought to be the earliest photographs of Black baseball players in action.
The four photographs all show ballplayers at the school. One was taken from just behind the catcher, close enough to see the faces of several of the boys--in the field, at bat, running bases, or reclining while waiting their turn at bat. The teams were apparently integrated. A substantial crowd including the House of Refuge band can be seen in the background. Another photo captioned "North Wing" is taken from high above the field, showing a game in progress, again with the band standing in shallow right field. A similar view captioned "South Wing" is taken simultaneously to show another game in progress on the school's second field (a full panorama of both fields has been seen in carte-de-visite form). Finally, another shot captioned "Gymnasium & Base Ball Boys" shows about thirty uniformed ballplayers posed around an array of outdoor exercise equipment, many of them holding or seated upon bats.
The images were originally shot in this stereo form, with infinitesimally different perspectives in the two facing images which would appear three-dimensional when seen through a special viewer. Halves of at least some of these images were also published as smaller cartes-de-visite. Mark Rucker, the leading scholar of early baseball photographs, reproduces two of these images in carte-de-visite form in his 1988 book "Baseball Cartes: The First Baseball Cards" as plate 58, describing it as "the first photo of Blacks playing ball. . . . Game action CDVs are rare, and this is the ultimate."
Rucker placed the date of these photographs as circa 1874. However, other examples of these views have been found with the series title "Views of the Western House of Refuge, Rochester N.Y. by Bacon & Carnall." This short-lived partnership appears in the Rochester city directories only in 1871, suggesting that the photographs were originally taken by that date. Franklin Wright Bacon (1819-1901) soon went into business on his own account at the same address, and continued publishing these views under the present "Views in Rochester and Vicinity" series title, as seen on the present examples. His firm became Franklin W. Bacon & Co. in the mid-1880s, so it would appear these prints were produced circa 1872 to 1885 from circa 1871 negatives.
The Western House of Refuge had several different baseball clubs, complete with their own uniforms. In the close-up of the game in progress, a team wearing an "A" on their uniforms is in the field, while one of the reclining boys in the foreground can be seen with a stylized spider on his uniform. The two distant views of games in progress both seem to show players wearing the "A." The boys at the gymnasium are wearing three separate uniforms: "B," "R" and the same "A's" as in the ballgame. The House of Refuge baseball games were sometimes covered in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle from this era; a team called the Spiders hosted a local youth team at the House (18 October 1871), and box scores were recorded for games for teams called the Excelsiors (15 May 1875) and Blue Stockings (3 August 1875), who had largely overlapping players. The Western House of Refuge was located on Backus Street in the northwestern part of Rochester. The school was closed in 1902, and the building is long since gone; the Edgerton Recreation Center is at the site today.
