By Greg Olson - [email protected]
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Around 1,000 people surrounded the field to watch the hometown Springfield baseball club get battered by a hitting machine from Jacksonville.
When the contest was over, the score stood 80-39 in favor of the more talented Jacksonville Hardins. The year was 1866, and the popularity of baseball was just beginning to spread across America.
The Hardins are believed to be the first baseball team organized in Jacksonville. Linus “Line” Chandler, an Illinois College student, put the club together in the summer of 1865. The original team included Morgan County Sheriff Smith Palmer, who played second base, and a center fielder named H.G. Whitlock, who soon thereafter was elected county judge.
Chandler, enthusiastic about the new game he had learned while a student in the East, taught the rules of baseball to Jacksonville young men as well as to his IC schoolmates. And several IC students joined the “Hercules Base Ball Club,” formed by Chandler in the spring of 1866.
The first baseball game played in Jacksonville was between the Hardins and the Hercules. And the first games, or matches, as they were then called, were played in Wolcott’s pasture, about where the Leonard & Six Plumbing and Heating business is now located on North East Street.
“The Hardins made a number of trips and became quite famous through their string of victories,” wrote Horace H. Bancroft of Jacksonville in a brief history of Jacksonville baseball, published in the Jacksonville Daily Journal in 1915.
The Hardins captured second place in a baseball tournament in Bloomington in the late 1860s by defeating a Chicago team, according to Bancroft. The team returned home “with a fine ebony bat, silver mounted and suitably engraved” as its trophy.
Many more Jacksonville teams followed the Hardins in the late 19th century, including the Jacksonville Stars and the Jacksonville Alerts. However, one of the most popular clubs, according to Bancroft, was the Jacksonville Blues.
The Blues played on a field just north of the Illinois School for the Deaf, between North Webster Avenue and Finley Street.
One of the stars of the 1885 Blues team was Charles Frederick “Silver” King, who pitched and played center field. King went on to win 207 games pitching in the major leagues in the 1880s and 1890s. His best season came in 1888, when he won 45 games hurling for St. Louis of the American Association.
Later on, Jacksonville baseball promoters became more ambitious and got Jacksonville clubs to join professional leagues such as the Western Association; the Kitty League, made up of teams from Kentucky, Illinois and Tennessee; the Iowa League; the Central Association; and the Northern League.
And the competition was pretty tough. For example, in 1894, Jacksonville fielded a team in the Western Association, which featured clubs from Des Moines, Peoria, St. Joseph, Missouri, Quincy, Lincoln, Nebraska, Omaha and Rock Island.
The manager of the 1894 Jacksonville team was Cornelius “Con” Strouthers, who was Ty Cobb’s first professional manager in 1904, when the future Hall-of-Famer broke in with the Augusta, Georgia, Tourists, a Class C minor league team in the South Atlantic, or Sally, League.
Jacksonville remained a part of the minor-league system into the early 20th century. Jacksonville baseball enthusiasts were even able to attract knowledgeable baseball men such as Clarence “Pants” Rowland, who managed a Jacksonville team around 1910. Rowland went on to pilot the Chicago White Sox from 1915 to 1918, a team that won the 1917 World Series.
Jacksonville played a small role in America’s national pastime. It was just one of more than 1,200 cities and towns across America that once fielded a professional baseball team in the past 130 years or so, according to Robert Obojski, author of the 1975 book, “Bush League: A History of Minor League Baseball.”
This Way We Were story was first published April 30, 2001.

Linus Child Chandler 1846-1897