Fundamental and intriguing questions remain about Abner Graves. The hard-working, resilient and opportunistic entrepreneur, cattleman, banker, mining engineer and real estate salesman had a long and productive life. But many men can claim long and productive lives. The thing that sets Graves apart is a story he put on paper more than a hundred years ago, a story that still resonates with many Americans.
Delving into his life provides some answers about his character. One persistent trait was his ongoing willingness to revise and improve his story. As time wore on, Graves embellished his role in the game he claimed had been played in Cooperstown. He graduated from a five-year-old onlooker to an active participant in the game with older boys, some of whom would have been as old as 18 or 19, such as Abner Doubleday. It’s apparent that he enjoyed his fame and that he received a free pass from reporters who ate up his stories and failed to apply any common sense or reality test to them.
Was Graves simply mistaken in his recollection? Some have claimed that his sanity may have been a factor, but the mental issues that prompted him to kill his spouse came nearly two decades after he wrote to the Mills Commission and were likely connected to senility. There is no evidence of mental impairment before he sent the letter, despite the uncorroborated suggestions of historians anxious to dismiss him with an easy explanation. If Graves was suffering from some form of mental illness in 1905, as alleged, it was certainly not reflected in his performance in society. His services were in demand to assess mining prospects in the west and he was trying to exploit his operation in Mexico with the help of his son, Nelson. Was Graves merely confused in some of his details? Some observers point to the existence of two Abner Doubledays in Cooperstown at the time Graves was growing up in the area. The first was the hero of Gettysburg, specifically identified in the letter by Graves. This Abner Doubleday was born in Balston Spa, north of Albany and as a boy moved with his family to Auburn, east of Syracuse. He had relatives in Cooperstown and likely visited them, including Abner Demas Doubleday, a younger cousin and lesser army officer who was disabled by sunstroke during the Civil War and later moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan.1 Graves was clear that it was the Civil War hero to whom he was referring, however. And we know that over the years Graves returned to Cooperstown, where friends likely would have kept him abreast of the whereabouts and exploits of boyhood acquaintances like the Doubledays. He may have legitimately mixed them up.
Was Graves guilty of writing pure fiction? And if so, what motivation would he have for that? That question goes back to his character. As we have seen, Graves often filed glowing reports about mining prospects. Several newspaper accounts attest to his excessive enthusiasm and occasional bouts of hyperbole. It may well be that his natural exuberance and willingness to express it landed him assessment work from mining companies. In any case, he seemed to have no shortage of work and was never at a loss for words when a newspaper reporter was around.2 Further research comparing his glowing assessment reports to the subsequent success or failure of various mining ventures would shed more light on the quality of his work and his credibility in his chosen field.
We know that Graves was prone to wishful thinking. Witness his claim as he approached the age of 80 that he was expecting to play shortstop in an exhibition game between Denver’s chamber of commerce and the real estate exchange.3 Likewise, as he touted his Mexican mine, he maintained that the area is “the greatest mining country of the south and has a future before it second to no district in the world.”4 But the letter sent to the Mills Commission is far more than embroidery—no substantial story existed for him to improve upon. Or was there in the account of another game in another country? Graves’s tale of Cooperstown had never been heard before, but was it a case of retelling the bare bones of another story with only the names and dates changed?
So it comes back to the question of whether Graves made it up. And if so, why? As a Mason and then a Shriner, he was expected to live his life according to the beliefs of the fraternal organization. One of those fundamental tenets is truthfulness. Had he not been truthful in his dealings with others, he would have been subject to repercussions, such as expulsion. He never would have reached the level of a Shriner in the fraternity. One would be hard-pressed to say no Mason or Shriner has ever lied, of course, but given his lengthy involvement in Freemasonry, a connection he valued, Graves would have been aware that his behavior would be scrutinized by others in the organization.
His granddaughter and family maintain that Graves, a man who sought recognition, was simply responding to a request for information and that he provided what he knew to Spalding’s commission. They claim that the reason his story didn’t add up when subjected to historical scrutiny was attributable to a mixup of dates. A family so proud of the accomplishments of Abner Graves as to publish a book about him would not want him remembered as a fabricator or plagiarist. Understandably so. Graves had an inventive mind and an ability to spot an opportunity to draw attention to himself and his boyhood home when one presented itself. That may help address “why” he did what he did. Albert Goodwill Spalding was determined to find evidence that proved baseball was American in origin. Graves delivered a story that provided enough evidence to suit the purposes of the iconic sporting goods entrepreneur. Spalding, then America, ran with the tale Graves told because it was so compelling—it included an American hero, an idyllic American setting and simple facts. The story then developed legs that likely surprised even its teller. And once it was out there, Graves reveled in its retelling and enhancement, never once correcting the change made by A.G. Mills to eliminate “plunking.” He wasn’t going to mess with the powers that had propelled him and his story to center stage.
For years, Graves has been dismissed in some circles as a crank, a mental case, an oddball or even a practical joker.5 Concerted probing, however, suggests that his mythical creation was inspired by another lesser-known tale that he may have seen in print or, more likely, heard first-hand on many occasions.
Adam Ford and Abner Graves were similar in many respects and so too were their stories. Three years apart in age, they had played baseball for as long as they could remember. They had coached and promoted the game. They married daughters of pioneers in the communities to which they moved from their hometowns. Graves and Ford were both involved in local government, Graves as a municipal treasurer, Ford as a councilor and mayor. Both left wives back east as they opted to start again in Denver, setting up shop downtown. Both enjoyed alcohol and baseball games and they must have shared friends through the Masons. Graves and Ford were self-promoters, the former through newspaper reporters mostly, while the latter penned his own accounts and delivered speeches in which he was the central figure. Both men also felt compelled to promote their hometowns as special places in the history of baseball. The era in which they lived was one of widespread interest in manly sports inspired by an athletic president who exerted not only his own muscles, but those of America as it took its place on the world stage. Teddy Roosevelt set the tone for his time. In Denver, ego, bravado, alcohol and interest in sport brought many residents together in the early days of the twentieth century. The saloon, as has been noted, was the ideal venue for swapping tall tales. So was the ballpark.
Adam Ford shared his story with Sporting Life in 1886, his immediate reason unknown. Perhaps he was responding to reports in previous issues that Spalding was wooing Toronto to consider a National League baseball franchise and Ford wanted readers to know about the longstanding baseball tradition on his home turf of tiny Beachville, about 150 miles west of the Ontario city. Or, he may have been motivated by ongoing stories in the publication about games from long ago and how rules and playing techniques had changed over time. At the time of his letter, Ford was acutely interested in the major professional leagues and following Sporting Life closely because his son Arthur was involved with the Cincinnati team that spring. Unlike Abner Graves, however, Ford was not responding to any invitation to share his early memories of baseball as part of some sort of grand inquiry or commission. His letter about his childhood memory of baseball in Beachville seems to have been spontaneous and unsolicited. He stood to gain nothing for his effort (which is what he received, at least during his lifetime).
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, has attracted more than fifteen million visitors since it opened in 1939. The 300,000 visitors each year who are attracted by the irresistible “creation myth” of baseball inject tens of millions of dollars into the economy of the picturesque village of 2,200. Author’s collection.
Ford was 55 when he wrote about Beachville and was describing events he had seen the summer he turned seven, some 48 years earlier. For Graves, his story was tapped out on a typewriter when he was 71, or 66 years after the summer when he claimed to have witnessed the birth of a sport. Ford made no claim that the Beachville game was the first game of baseball played; Graves maintained that he was eyewitness to the invention of the game in Cooperstown. Other than that significant difference, both described with remarkable clarity how the game was played and provided the names of players. Both stories seemed plausible. It took subsequent research to determine the truth. And while Graves’ tale failed the litmus test, there is no doubt that an early version of baseball was played in the area around the same time, as suggested by the writing of James Fenimore Cooper. Evidence also suggests that bat-and-ball games were played throughout the wider area where both men spent their formative years, about 350 miles apart.6
Merchants in Cooperstown have promoted baseball’s creation myth to their financial advantage. “Birthplace of Baseball” appears on a wide range of souvenirs tourists take home each year. This retailer incorporates the myth into its name. Author’s collection.
To achieve recognition, Ford relied on politics in his early life, returning to it much later in Denver, where he said he delivered many speeches to political audiences. He was considered a fine raconteur, both orally and in written form. Accounts of his curling exploits were colorful and were so well received that he was repeatedly asked for more. Like Graves, Ford was an avid newspaper reader and was known to put pen to paper to share his thoughts with editors. Unlike Graves, his baseball story was told and then, for the most part, forgotten for nearly a century.
Ford’s story about Beachville seems to ring true. Respected researcher and historian Robert Knight Barney, a New Englander with an American pedigree that dates to the Mayflower, is convinced of it. He and fellow researcher Nancy Bouchier were able to validate much of Ford’s account. They resurrected a story that had been largely forgotten and their work proved persuasive in Canada. Their efforts saw the Canadian government issue a postage stamp in 1988, marking the 150th anniversary of the Beachville game. And the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum found a permanent home near Beachville in St. Marys, the town to which Ford moved and from which he fled in disgrace after the poisoning case.
The modest quarters of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in St. Marys, Ontario. Because of space constraints in the former farmhouse, only one-third of its artifacts can be displayed. St. Marys, about 30 miles from Beachville, has been home of the hall since the early 1990s. Fundraising for a suitable new structure has been slow. Author’s collection.
The game played in Beachville as described by Ford was not as evolved as the game played by the Knickerbockers seven or eight years later. Some historians believe that the elimination of “soaking” base runners with the ball marked the turning point that took town ball or other games into new territory. Indeed, it is likely that A.G. Mills eliminated that aspect of the game from Graves’s account in order to show that it more closely resembled baseball as it was played in 1907. The Knickerbockers of 1845–46 dispensed with that aspect of the game and it has been argued that that innovation amounted to a watershed moment for baseball.7 In Ford’s game, “soaking” was still a feature, so it would be a tall order to make the case the 1838 game in Beachville was the first game of modern baseball. Neither Ford nor researchers Barney and Bouchier made such a claim.
The similarities between Abner Graves and Adam Ford are so uncanny that it’s almost as if they were mirror images. Decades after the fact, they told stories of baseball games played when they were boys. Those stories eventually led to celebrations, postage stamps and halls of fame in their respective countries. Graves and Ford had long connections to the sport and had moved to make fresh starts in life in a sport-obsessed city known for its saloon culture. The engineer and the doctor both liked alcohol and were rather extroverted types who welcomed the limelight. It is not hard to imagine them bragging about many things, among them baseball, while enjoying a beverage or two in a favorite downtown Denver watering hole.
The bustling downtown of St. Marys, Ontario, known as “Stonetown” because of the extensive use of locally quarried limestone. The town, home of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, is more than twice the size of Cooperstown and about seven hours west of it. Author’s collection.
Aside from their successes, they were no strangers to failure. Graves’s business in Iowa floundered and the great potential predicted for his mine in Mexico was not realized. An apparently unhappy second marriage and the shooting of Minnie saw led to his death a mental hospital, a sad end to an otherwise productive life. For Ford, the poisoning case in St. Marys destroyed his reputation there and prompted his move west. His struggles with the addictions of his son Arthur, the unhappy experience with the Washington Sanitarium and the financial problems that kept him from sending much money back east to daughter Julia were among his other trials. Ford’s death in modest quarters with overdue rent, his drug-addled son hovering nearby, marked a similarly sad end. Both Graves and Ford were involved in homicides in which poison, or talk of poison, was a factor. For Ford, poison caused the death of Robert Guest. And for his son, Arthur, it led to the death of a patient in his sanitarium and criminal charges. For Graves, it was his expressed fear of being poisoned by Minnie that prompted him to fire four shots into her body.
So, again, is the story told by Abner Graves a complete fabrication, an adaptation or a heist? We are left only with best guesses.
It would seem that the always opportunistic Abner Graves seized the day in Akron, Ohio, when he read Albert Spalding’s article in the Beacon Journal. Caught up in the same zeal as the sporting goods magnate to prove baseball’s origins were purely American, the fertile mind of Graves went to work. He may have taken some hazy memories of his playmates playing bat-and-ball games and decided that he could spin them into an engaging tale to help Spalding in his quest. He didn’t need to look far for additional inspiration. For several years, Adam Ford, a fellow fan of the Denver Grizzlies and his business neighbor with mutual acquaintances, had been telling his own story about a baseball game he witnessed as a young boy. Ford’s story helped Graves embellish his own recollections and these details, based in the reality of a game that most likely actually happened, increased the plausibility of Graves’s tale. Graves likely borrowed not only the idea of telling a story about a game of ball from his youth, but certain aspects of the story itself. He wanted to draw attention to Cooperstown so he used elements of Ford’s story as a basis to create his own. Like Ford, he described the practice of “soaking,” which Graves called “plunking,” and he named several of the players who took part in the game. He also described the location of the preferred playing field. Unlike Ford, however, he didn’t attempt to provide distances between the bases, focusing more on how Abner Doubleday scratched out new rules and transformed town ball on the spot.
The similarity between the storytellers is as striking as parallels between the stories they told. Given everything they shared, it is hard to believe that their orbits didn’t intersect at some point. No hard evidence has been unearthed to date that proves categorically that the two men met, but it is an irresistible conclusion based on a balance of probabilities. There are far too many points of potential contact to put their telling of stories down to sheer coincidence.
Abner Graves likely borrowed or, less charitably, stole the story about the first game of baseball, or at least parts of it. He created a story that could not have happened, taking inspiration from an event that actually occurred. The game as played in Beachville was brought into the colony by settlers who came either from Great Britain directly or after stopping first in New England, New York or Pennsylvania. Adam Ford’s father, for instance, was born in a northern county of Ireland and lived for a time in Pennsylvania before moving north. Ford’s father-in-law was born in Vermont before deciding his future lay a few hundred miles to the west. When newcomers came to build new lives in North America, they brought along their customs and their values as well as their games. It can be no surprise that games resembling baseball were played in places like New England, New York City, Cooperstown and Beachville. Migration and evolution were key factors and muddy any quest to pinpoint when and where baseball came into being.8
Graves did not act alone. While his inspiration was likely drawn from Ford, his motivation unquestionably came from the appeal made by Albert Goodwill Spalding. Spalding was a man on a mission, goaded on by Henry Chadwick’s bold 1903 assertion in Spalding’s own baseball guide that there was “no doubt” that baseball was derived from rounders. Spalding, as we have seen, hand-picked a group of like-minded men to settle the paternity of baseball “for all time” and to prove its American origin. The chair for his committee, A.G. Mills, had declared years earlier at the Delmonico’s banquet that “patriotism and research” had already established baseball’s American pedigree. The fix was in and the die was cast—Spalding’s kangaroo court stood by to do his bidding. A story that could meet the needs of Spalding and his cronies would be looked on favorably. All that was needed was some sort of evidence. Anything. And Graves delivered it. His tale had no independent corroboration, but there was no other story that fit the bill despite the three years during which Spalding and the Mills Commission sought one. The stage had been set for Abner Graves and he served up an account that was even better than Spalding could have imagined. No less than a Civil War figure, a lesser American icon, was the inventor of the game. Perfect. And for Mills it was a delightful revelation that his old friend Abner Doubleday was getting the credit. Never mind that despite their many conversations over the years, Doubleday never let on to Mills that he was the young genius who devised America’s national pastime. Or that he failed to mention the achievement in his many speeches or books.
Having been delivered a story he liked, albeit one that he couldn’t verify from other sources, Spalding felt that he finally had what he needed to trump his old friend Chadwick and to prove that baseball was not derived from a child’s game in England that he had denounced as “an asinine pastime.”9 Baseball came from the inventive mind of a manly man, a national treasure, and on American soil. It couldn’t get better—or more American—than that. And just as Spalding was determined to trump Chadwick, so too Graves may have been anxious to trump a talkative Canadian whose baseball story undermined the idea of a made-in-America sport.
While Spalding had originally been inclined to accept rounders as the father of the sport in which he excelled, his about-face in later years was dramatic and became an obsession. Chadwick, the promoter of rounders, seemed to laugh off the rounders-versus-baseball controversy, but for Spalding it became all-consuming. He had good reasons. The boy from small-town Illinois had lived the American dream by excelling at a game that became the national pastime, by moving on to become president of the Chicago White Stockings, then president of the National League. He was a hugely influential man in baseball and in business, a titan, the head of a highly successful sporting goods empire. Baseball—and America—had been very, very good to Albert Goodwill Spalding. He was a wealthy and influential man and had the means to get what he wanted. His way was the American way and he often ridiculed the English as too dim-witted and weak to play the game in which he starred. Cricket, he argued, was more suited to their physical and mental capabilities.10 He was as determined, in his way, to sever the umbilical cord from Britain as the exasperated but determined men who signed the Declaration of Independence many decades earlier. Spalding, in his resolve to prove that there was no connection to England, was prepared to appropriate the game rooted in another country. He did so at a time when America was emerging as a world power and asserting itself on the world stage. Nothing could be more embarrassing for a man like Spalding than to concede that the national pastime of America was the offspring of a game played by English schoolchildren. He was prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to steal the game, if necessary. What other conclusion can be drawn from his comments on the subject, his appointment of like-minded men to prove his belief and then his acceptance, promotion and publication of the uncorroborated statements of Abner Graves? America’s National Game was his celebration of pulling off a heist and creating history. It’s hard to forget the over-the-top assertion Spalding made in its introductory pages, which captured his mindset:
I claim that Base Ball owes its prestige as our National Game to the fact that as no other form of sport it is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness; American Dash, Discipline, Determination; American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm; American Pluck, Persistency, Performance; American Spirit, Sagacity, Success; American Vim, Vigor, Virility.11
Spalding was a man on a mission and Abner Graves helped him to achieve that mission. If Abner Graves is guilty of adopting part, or all, of the story of a game from another storyteller, which seems likely, Albert Goodwill Spalding was an accomplice. Beyond that, Spalding’s greater mission was to appropriate the game from the English and defeat the intransigent bulldog Chadwick. In that, Spalding succeeded. He found a nation ready and willing to believe the story that he promoted as fact. In 1939, Spalding was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in the executive category, it being noted on his plaque that “he gained renown as the era’s top promoter of baseball as the national game.”
Graves, it would seem, lifted his story from his own “Chadwick” in the person of Adam Ford, a friendly rival and baseball lover born in a colony of Britain. Graves has been largely forgotten and often dismissed, unlike his partner in crime. Regardless, it can be argued that Spalding and his accomplice Graves pulled off a successful double steal for baseball.