In 1871, Doc Adams became the first President of the Ridgefield Savings Bank (now the Fairfield County Bank), a position he would hold in two separate terms for ten of the next fifteen years. His photo still hangs downstairs at the main branch alongside portraits of the bank’s other presidents.
Continue reading →The 1857 Convention of Base Ball Players met for the first time on January 22 at Smith’s Hotel, the headquarters of the Knickerbocker Club, with the following clubs represented: Knickerbocker, Gotham, Eagle, Empire, Putnam, Baltic, Excelsior, Atlantic, Harmony, Harlem, Eckford, Bedford, Narrau, and Continental. The clubs elected Daniel Adams of the Knickerbockers as president of the convention and then appointed a rules committee, made up of one member of each represented club. This was perhaps the most important meeting in the history of baseball. It was a meeting of the baseball clubs of New York City, and unlike the previous … Continue reading →
Lawrence Baldassaro’s 2002 book, The American Game, included a chapter by Frederick Ivor-Campbell titled “The Many Fathers of Baseball: Anglo-Americans and the Early Game”. In it, Ivor-Campbell wrote about the previously most overlooked “father” of baseball, Doc Adams. SABR’s Nineteenth Century Base Ball Conference was named in Ivor-Campbell’s honor after he passed in a tragic car accident just a few months after the first 19th Century Base Ball Conference. It was fitting that the conference was named after him since he was among the historians and researchers that began the 19th Century base ball research renaissance that is still going … Continue reading →
Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella in their book, “The New Biographical History of Baseball: The Classic—Completely Revised” refer to Doc Adams as one of the “candidates for the honorific title of Father of Baseball”.
Continue reading →What may you ask does a book titled “Searching for Mary Schäffer: Women Wilderness Photography” by Colleen Skidmore have to do with Doc Adams? The description of the book is as follows: Mary Schäffer was a photographer, writer, botanical painter, and mapmaker from Philadelphia, well known for her travels in the Canadian Rockies and Jasper at the turn of the twentieth century. In Searching for Mary Schäffer, Colleen Skidmore takes up Schäffer’s own resonant themes—women and wilderness, travel and science—to ask new questions, tell new stories, and reassess the persona of Mary Schäffer imagined in more recent times. Public and private … Continue reading →
The New York Clipper according to its masthead, was “The Oldest American Sporting and Theatrical Journal”. It was the standard bearer of sports weeklies during the 19th century. When died in 1899, Doc Adams was remembered in this publication, one of the earliest to regularly cover sports in the United States and one that played an important role in popularizing baseball in the country, as follows:
Continue reading →Doc Adams on the shortstop position from the seminal February 29, 1896 Sporting News interview. “I used to play shortstop, and I believe I was the first to occupy that place, as it had formerly been left uncovered. At different times I have, however, played in every position except that of pitcher. We had a splendid catcher in the person of Charles S. Debost, who would be a credit to the position even to-day, I am sure. He was a good batter also, and a famous player in his day. Thw Spoering Newa (February 29, 1896) John Thorn tweeted the … Continue reading →
Here are some excerpts of Doc Adam’s executive history with the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club from the point of view of the annual meetings. These extracts are from “Book of American Pastimes, Containing a History of the Principal Base Ball, Cricket, Rowing and Yachting Clubs of the United States“, Charles A. Peverelly, 1866
Continue reading →The following is from the “Biographical and Historical Record of the Class of 1835 in Yale College, for the Fifty Years from the Admission of the Class to College” published in 1881 by Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, Printers, 371 State Street, New Haven, CT.
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