Finding Fort Gillem Base Ball Grounds in Nashville

Nashville "base ball" began in earnest in 1866. Although informal practices and matches had been played on "the flats" of Edgefield (present day site of Nissan Stadium) as early as 1860 and Edgefield would become one of the premier sites for the national game in the post-Civil War era as the home grounds of the Rock City and Phoenix Clubs of Nashville, Nashville's other prominent 1860s base ball grounds was the Fort Gillem Base Ball Grounds.

Fort Gillem, a strategic defensive point to secure Nashville from advancing Rebel forces during the American Civil War, is long gone. It was located in the vicinity of present day Jackson Street near 17th and 18th Avenues, to the northwest of the Capitol building. The fort, built by Gainesboro (Jackson County), Tennessee native General Alvan Cullem Gillem and his 10th Tennessee Volunteer Regiment (USA) , was about 120 feet square with narrow ditches, walled with stone, 6 feet high, with emplacements for eight artillery pieces.

Gillem had cut his teeth in the Third Seminole War following his graduation from West Point in 1851. Thereafter, he was stationed on the western frontier of Texas. The Civil War brought him back to Tennessee where he spent the bulk of the war serving in Union occupied Nashville before taking the field and serving in various East Tennessee campaigns in 1864 to secure the region for its loyal Unionists from Rebel incursions. His most notable Civil War exploits involved driving Confederate forces led by John C. Vaughn out of Morristown, and the state for that matter, as well as surprising and killing Rebel cavalryman John H. Morgan in Greeneville. Although the fort that came to be bear his name was officially renamed Fort Sill in early 1863 in honor of Brigadier General Joshua W. Sill, who was killed at the Battle of Stones River, Nashvillians continued to refer to the earthworks as Fort Gillem.

General Alvan Cullem Gillem (USA)

Gen. Gillem, Mount Olivet Cemetery, Nashville

The fort was abandoned by Union troops after the war; however, due to the surrounding lands having been largely cleared for its construction, it was not long before a rising class of professional Nashvillians found a new use for the grounds. Throughout 1866 and 1867, the remnants of Fort Gillem was claimed as the home grounds of the Cumberland Base Ball Club. It was here, on the Fort Gillem Base Ball Grounds on the afternoon of April 21, 1866, according to the extant sources, that the first organized base ball match in Nashville was to be played between the Rock City and Cumberland clubs. It should be noted, however, that a search of the city's newspapers have failed to yield the outcome of the April 21 match. A newspaper report later in the season lists a total of four matches between the two clubs, but does not mention April 21. Was it a friendly scrimmage between two "green" clubs instead of an official game? Was it called off due to rain or something else? Who knows? But if the two clubs did play (and a survey of non-digitized Nashville newspapers could yield the answer), it would represent the first known organized base ball match in Nashville and might be presumed that the Cumberland Club claimed the victory. In fact, in every instance in which the two teams are reported to have played, the Cumberland never lost at the hands of the Rock City, winning by an average of 40.5 runs.

Announcement of first organized base ball game in Nashville, Union and American, April 21, 1866

A number of prominent matches were played on the Fort Gillem Base Ball Grounds in the immediate postwar years (which, by the way of a disclaimer, is the extent of my research into Nashville base ball). Rock City and Cumberland vied for the first Davidson County championship during the spring and summer season of 1866 with the latter taking the title. On July 31, 1866, Fort Gillem hosted the first match in what was billed as the "Championship of the South" between the Cumberland and Louisville Base Ball Clubs. In this first game, as in the second and deciding match in the series, the Kentucky state champs won an easy victory, this one, 39-23 over the Tennessee ballists.

Before long, scores of base ball grounds sprung up around the city, some on the grounds of former Union forts such as Fort Houston, where the Nashville Base Ball Club began their successful state championship run in 1868 against the Knoxville Holston Base Ball Club. As other grounds were fitted up for base ball, the American Missionary Association and a number of prominent educators had designs for Fort Gillem in the summer of 1867. Their vision included building a school with the expressed purpose of training teachers to help educate both children and adults among the South's nearly four million recently freed people. From that idea came Fisk University. In 1876, the institution's first permanent academic building, Jubilee Hall, was finally completed on what was Fort Gillem. Funds to erect the building had been raised in large part due to the Fisk Jubilee Singers' widely popular tour of Europe in 1873.



Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee

Next time I'm in Nashville I plan to finally visit Fisk University and take a stroll of the campus. Just maybe, if I strain my ears, I'll hear the sounds of a bat striking a ball, the three cheers given for the ladies in attendance, and the sounds of corks beginning to pop as the Cumberland and Louisville Base Ball Clubs set aside any hard feelings incurred over the first game for the 1866 "Championship of the South" to celebrate one's company, which, was a significant part of the nineteenth century amateur game, an admirable quality that distinguished what was once, albeit briefly, a largely gentleman's game from that of the hypercompetitive modern game.

Sources: A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men's History and Masculinity, Vol. 1 (Indiana Univ. Press, 1999, 558; Tennessee State Library and Archives