The Old Home Place
Here is a place, out behind the barn that Little Jimmie Dickens sang about, much later, a place down the hill, past the cows, on the other side of the levy, out of sight from the gravel road that passes over the bridge and winds its way west, joining other tributaries through Mercer County, passing through Viola, Aledo, Joy, New Boston, and ending at last at the Mississippi River. Here is a ball field, virtual, unadorned, maintained haphazardly now, rising up from the levied confluence of the Edwards River and Parker Run with a cornered sharpness it never knew in the 19th century. An occasional field now amid the alien corn, existing only at off-crop times of the year, rising to play out of the snow in March before the crops come, buried in vegetation during the summer, then returning again in the fall, brought to life before the swath of a leased combine, a dirt field of corn stubble and brush, burrs, weeds, groundhogs, ambling coyotes, around which men, boys, farmers, vagabonds, passersby once assembled to throw, hit, run, catch, field, in a raw field at the joining of two strands of water. Here Baby Doll Jacobson first played, escaping from the drudgery of coal mining that defined his hometown of Cable two miles north, joining the St. Louis Browns in the 1920s, dying in 1977 east of here in Orion, where Greens' legend Fate Norris would live and die twenty years later. Here in this anonymous place, baseball was once played, avidly, roughly. It was another time, a time long ago.
Once this was the practice field of the Rock Island franchise of the Three-I League in the early years of the last century (1901-1911, 1916-1917, 1920-1921). No champions paced its bases or patrolled its outfield. These were forgotten men, laboring in a Class B minor league, often working second jobs to supplement their baseball pay, milking cows with the sunrise, chasing chickens and goats at sunset, playing ball in between, hoping and all the while doubting that they would ever see the smooth major-league fields of St. Louis, Chicago, and points east, in the days before the big leagues crossed the Mississippi. Before the Three-I League, this space hosted town ball contests, drawing teams from towns throughout Mercer County (Alexis, Eliza, Duncan, Griffin, Cable, Sunbeam) and once playing host to an 1866 match between a Mercer County all-star team and the celebrated Rockford Forest City team featuring future Hall of Famer, sporting goods entrepreneur, and scoundrel Al Spalding. History records the Forest City team a decided winner, though the score is lost to time. In the 1920s and 30s the field was a practice facility of the Roosevelt Military Academy in Aledo, until that institution too joined the legion of rural ghosts, alongside William and Vashti College, 1908-1923, the school which preceded it on that site. Long ago.
Now crops come and crops go, pushed in and pulled out by high machines. The levy holds and some years it doesn't. Coyotes scamper, pause, simper, joust, and howl. Groundhogs burrow, and field mice cower from cruising black hawks. But there's no one here to remember when men played a boys game below these soft hills that Indians once called home.