Louis Fenn Wadsworth – The Origins of Baseball
Few would disagree that baseball is an American game. From its first incarnation on American soil, to the modern day game, baseball reaches deep into our heritage as a nation. Perhaps no other game is so widely associated with the virtues of American society as baseball. The freedom we feel on a warm summer day at the ballpark is like no other experience in the world. Yet come October, our competitive juices begin to flow, and the restful game of summer gives way to the frenzied activity of playoffs and ultimately the World Series. Who but the Americans could envision world domination in a game played on manicured grass surrounded by ivy covered walls? But I digress.
As inextricable as baseball is from our relatively young national conscience, there is very little that we truly understand about its beginnings. After years shrouded in mystery and deception, recent research may have uncovered the real “inventors” of the modern game of baseball. And as you might guess, a Wadsworth is at the center of the action.
Most people grew up with the idea that Abner Doubleday invented baseball…but nothing could be further from the truth. Doubleday never claimed to have anything to do with baseball and was nowhere near the site of the “first” game. Without getting into the details of why he was mistakenly assigned credit, the history of baseball begins with its first organized team, the New York Knickerbockers.
The “Knicks” became the first generally accepted formal baseball club in the United States in the 1840’s. Alexander Cartwright, an early club member, suggested that a committee formulate a set of rules, and in 1845 Cartwright and three of his Knicks teammates, set down 20 basic rules of play. Cartwright; Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams; William Rufus Wheaton; and Louis Fenn Wadsworth, each provided input on the new set of rules. The name Cartwright is known to many baseball fans, as he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in the year of its founding. Adams and Wheaton have been subjects of years of investigative scholarship. The mysterious Wadsworth, however, is the subject of controversy and speculation. In the end, his may be the most compelling story of all.
The new rules written by Cartwright, Adams, Lucius and Wadsworth, stated that the field was to be laid out on a diamond with a base length fixed at 90 feet. The rising popularity of the game as a spectator sport may have, in part, resulted from the creation of foul lines, which allowed spectators an opportunity to get closer to the action. Finally, changing the game’s length from a “runs” rule to an “innings” rule created a game that would look familiar to a modern spectator. In those days, the first team to score 21 runs was declared the winner. Today’s nine-inning game is the result of the 1845 rule changes.
So what contribution did Mr. Wadsworth make? Well, to answer this question, we reluctantly return to the Abner Doubleday story. In 1905, Al Spalding, a former player and sporting goods entrepreneur, organized a panel to investigate the origins of baseball. The “Mills Commission” report as it was known, based on dubious research, concluded that Doubleday had invented baseball. Abraham G. Mills, who wrote the final report, was not satisfied that the report was accurate, and continued to research the subject beyond the end of the commission’s three month mandate.
Mills, in a letter dictated to his stenographer in the afternoon of December 30, 1907, stated his conclusions and anointed Doubleday as per Spalding’s wishes. In the letter, however, he commented on an unsettled question: “I am also much interested in the statement made by Mr. Curry, of the pioneer Knickerbocker club, and confirmed by Mr. Tassie, of the famous old Atlantic club of Brooklyn, that a diagram, showing the ball field laid out substantially as it is today, was brought to the field one day by a Mr. Wadsworth. Mr. Curry says ‘the plan caused a great deal of talk, but, finally, we agreed to try it.'”
Curry had made the statement to reporter Will Rankin in 1877, and Rankin had written about it to Mills 28 years later, looking to adjust his story. No more was heard about Wadsworth until, when rummaging through carbon copies of Mills’ letters in 1982, John Thorn came upon a few notes from 1908 indicating that Mills, despite the conclusion of the Commission’s work, had continued to search for Wadsworth. On January 6, 1908, Mills wrote to the reporter Rankin: “…you quote Mr. Curry as stating that ‘some one had presented a plan showing a ball field,’ etc., and … Mr. Tassie told you that he remembered the incident, and that he ‘thought it was a Mr. Wadsworth….”
Tassie was serving on the rules committee with Wadsworth in 1857 when Wadsworth moved that the length of the game be set at nine innings rather than the seven that his fellow Knickerbockers had proposed. Could Tassie’s memory of the incident been wrong? Was it Cartwright and not Wadsworth that suggested the changes as some have speculated? Had Wadsworth previously brought a diagram to the Knick field in 1854-55, before Adams lengthened the baselines to 90 feet and the pitcher’s distance to 45? Might Wadsworth have been instrumental in those changes as well? We may never know the answers to the questions about who was responsible for the layout of the modern baseball field and the nine-inning game. The mysterious Louis Fenn Wadsworth is yet another figure in our heritage that makes our family so interesting.
What ever became of Wadsworth? According to Thorn, he went on to become a New Jersey judge but eventually lost his fortune and family, committing himself to a poorhouse in 1898, his connection to baseball all but forgotten. Oddly, in his obituary in the Hartford Daily Times on Saturday April 4, 1908, it was written that: “A veritable book worm, day after day, he would sit reading…. In the summer he was particularly interested in following the scores of the ball games of the big leagues, and of late years the game was the one great object of interest to him.”
Many thanks to John Thorn for the content of this article. His July 16, 2005 Blog, Four Fathers of Baseball” serves as the basis for this story. I look forward to his next book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, which will be published with Simon and Schuster in the spring of 2008.
Interesting story and I can provide the ancestry of this great unknown inventor of our Great American pastime! His father was Amos Wadsworth (1786-1850) the son of Luke Wadsworth (1759-1817) and Abigail Cowles. Luke was the son of James Wadsworth (1729- 1773) and Abigail Lewis. James was the son of Samuel Wadsworth II (1698-1745) and Susannah Fenn (No doubt the origin of Louis’s middle name.) Samuel was the son of Samuel Sr. (1660-1731) and Hannah Judson. Samuel was the son of John Wadsworth who arrived on the Lyon with his father William in Boston in 1632. It’s great to know that baseball was influenced by a member of our family.
I do not show any children for Louis, however, his brother Charles W. had a son Walter(1854-1934) who lived in Shiawassee Co, Mi. If anyone can pick up the trail from there I would be very interested. I do know that other descendants of the Samuel line are living today in Buffalo, NY and SF. The whole genealogy can be seen on my web site at http://www.wadsworthinstitute.org Chart 1 (at the top)
Louis Fenn Wadsworth was married to a sister of my gr. gr. gr. grandfather. Her name was Maria Isabel Meschutt, widow of Jackson Fisher, who had two young children when she married Wadsworth. I learned his mother’s name was Amanda M. ___?___ but do not have proof of his father’s name. Amanda was living with son, Louis’ older brother, Charles W. Wadsworth in the 1880 Owosso, Michigan census. Widowed mother, Amanda, was living with him and his family at that time.
1870 Rockaway, NJ Census: Maria Wadsworth and Louis F. Wadsworth, both 45, listed in Rockaway, Morris Co. NJ census. Marianne is 13, Charles Fisher is 17. Louis is listed as a farmer. Maria has $25,000 in real estate in her own name. (over one half million dollars in today’s values) Louis has $15,000 and a person estate of $2000. They have a 14 year old boy in the household as a farm laborer.
1880 Plainfield NJ Census: Maria Wadsworth and husband, Louis Fenn Wadsworth, attorney and Justice of the Peace (& census enumerator) in Plainsfield, NJ. Daughter is listed as Marianne Wadsworth–I believe she is Fisher’s daughter adopted by Wadsworth at time of marriage. Charles is listed as stepson, others in household are Maria’s aunt, Hanna Cation, 87, single, Mary L. Lyon, her niece, and her grand niece and nephew Alonzo C. and Emma E. Brackett, their son Alonzo C. Brackett, Jr., and a domestic servant, age 14.
John Thorne, the noted baseball writer mentions Louis F. Wadsworth and his wife in his excellent book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden. Below are quotes from this book:
“You want the truth, you have to read “Baseball in the Garden of Eden,” a splendid new book by John Thorn.
Thorn is that rare archaeologist who can dig in ancient civilizations and then elegantly describe what he has found. He sprinkles sequins where other baseball historians scatter decimal points. He has been named baseball’s official historian and he has written the best of the flutter of baseball books that arrive in the spring like so many robins.
In the 1850s, there were many versions of baseball, varying from region to region. Thorn credits Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton and Louis Fenn Wadsworth with codifying the game, configuring the jumble into one set of rules.
But first he had to solve the mystery of Wadsworth. Thorn knew that Wadsworth played first base for the Gothams and the Knickerbockers from the early 1850s to 1862. And then, poof, he vanished. That baffled Thorn who writes that, “He is the man responsible for baseball being played to nine innings and with nine men.”
It turned out Wadsworth had left New York in 1862 for Rockaway in Morris County, N.J., with his new wife, the wealthy widow Maria Fisher. He later became a judge in Union County. When his wife died, he began drinking and squandered a fortune estimated at $300,000.
After selling Sunday papers on the streets of Plainfield, in 1898 he committed himself to the poorhouse, where he died 10 years later without ever having had a single visitor.”
Louis is buried with wife, Maria, in Brooklyn’s beautiful Greenwood Cemetery in the Meschutt plot. I am glad he has received his due after all these years.