Before the creation of the first Negro National League (NNL) in 1920, many professional and semi-professional African American teams took to the ball field, giving hundreds of men the chance to earn their livelihood by playing baseball. One of the best of these clubs, the Page Fence Giants, found a home in Adrian, Michigan, not far from Detroit, in 1895. Made up of crack players, including some of the biggest stars of the day, the Giants took part in a number of memorable games — most of them resounding victories for Page Fence — on their way to a self-proclaimed colored championship.
In 1894, The Local Light Guard Armory in Adrian worked hard to put a solid nine on the baseball diamond. Under manager L. A. Brown and team president Rolla Taylor, the Light Guard club came together to give the Adrian fans something to cheer about as a mix of veterans, like veteran catcher Henry Yalk, and newcomers, including soon to-be ace George Wilson, brought baseball to the city. Wilson, from Palmyra, Michigan, was only 17 years old, but he would lead the team to victory after victory, pitching with a confidence and maturity beyond his years. His first win, in late July 1894, was a 12-2 victory over nearby Hudson, Michigan’s nine was a preview of things to come.
Against a strong contingent from Findlay, Ohio, the Light Guard Armory team fared less well, losing 19-9 and 6-0. But the series would eventually be counted a success, as it brought them into direct contact with Findlay’s star second baseman, Bud Fowler. Fowler had helped his club beat the Detroit Tigers twice, and in the process had gained a national reputation. Announcing plans to relocate to Adrian in 1895, joining former teammate Doug Underwood, Fowler told local reporters that his new Cuban Giants team would play at Lawrence Park, after some necessary repairs were made. Fowler wanted to have his team play in Findlay, he said, but was not able to secure the needed backing for the team.
Local sports promoter Len Hoch saw Fowler’s plan as a great way to talk up the small town of Adrian. Hoch agreed to put up part of the $500 needed to finance the new ball club. Both Hoch and Fowler wanted to develop a team that had a national reputation, which meant the team would need to travel a great deal. To accomplish their travel Fowler wanted the team to have its own railroad car. Additionally, for the club to be a success, on and off the field, Fowler believed pitcher George Wilson would be a central cog. The other key would be attracting future Hall of Famer Grant Johnson to Adrian from Findlay.
On September 20, 1894, the local papers announced, “Bud Fowler’s scheme has finally materialized.” The Page Woven Wire Fence Company saw this new venture as a great advertising opportunity for their fences and became the team’s primary sponsor. They put their name on the railroad car the team traveled in and their initals on the jerseys of the club’s black and maroon uniforms. In addition to securing a sponsor, Fowler succeeded in persuading Johnson and Wilson to join this new club. The team would go on to barnstorm around the midwest.
According to wikipedia, the team played it’s first game on April 9, 1895.
n May 1895, the Page Fence Giants rolled into Kalamazoo for the first time to begin a best-of-three series against the state league Kazoos at the North Street ballpark, and true to form, they beat the local team rather badly in the process. “The [third] game was a hot one from the start,” stated a reporter for the Telegraph, “and although it went deservedly to the hard hitting visitors, it was by all odds the prettiest one put up here this season.”
“Nine chocolate colored ball players, traveling under the name of the Page Fence Giants, in a private car, have been making a tour of the central states, demonstrating to the Western, National and minor league ball players that the latter knew nothing of how the game should be played. St. Paul, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Dubuque and others had succumbed to African muscle and brains, and yesterday Kalamazoo’s scalp was added to the already big stock of cappilaceous relics… (the Giants) rubbed the rich celery earth of the league grounds deep into the hides of the local players…” —Kalamazoo Daily Telegraph, 16 May 1895
To help generate crowds when they arrived in a city, the players dressed in their railroad car and then paraded to the ball field riding on 12 monarch bicycles purchased from William S. Sheldon, owner of the Monarch Bicycle Company, another of the team’s sponsors, while fans followed them to the ball diamond. The Giants traveled in style. Their 60-foot car had sleeping areas as well as their own porter and cook so as to avoid the hassles of having nowhere to sleep or eat on the road in Jim Crow America. Fowler believed this was necessary since they had no home ball park (Lawrence Park, in Adrian, was also used by the Demons, also known as the Reformers, in 1895) and consequently spent most of their time on the road.
As was so often the case with early black teams, even when successful on the field, the Page Fence club ran into financial difficulties, leading them to reorganize in 1899, when they began the season as the Columbia Giants, sponsored by the Columbia Club of Chicago. They found themselves playing an early game in Racine, Illinois, where they picked up a new player named John Brown. Despite the reorganization, local papers continued to refer to the barnstorming team as “Page Fence” or as the “former Page Fence Giants,” no doubt believing their readers were familiar with the team and its reputation for strong play As late as 1903, in fact, after the Page Fence Giants had been gone for five seasons, some papers still referenced the early championship squad.
One of the premier professional colored teams in the 1890s, and the first to appear in the Midwest, the Page Fence Giants demonstrated early that black baseball could succeed outside of the East Coast, where teams such as the Cuban Giants and X-Giants had flourished in part because of the large fan bases found in cities along the seaboard. While there are still many gaps in the record of the Giants, the skeletal record provided in this article supports their claim to be the champions of black baseball in 1895 and 1896. Beating both the Chicago Unions and the Cuban X-Giants in head-to-head series, taking games against Western Association and Western League clubs, and trouncing many of the smaller, unaffiliated teams of the East and West, Page Fence dominated the competition and, barnstorming their way across multiple states, expanded the footprint of black baseball.
Sources:
Lelie Heaphy, “The Page Fence Giants: Nineteenth Century Champions. Black Ball 5.1 (Spring 2012): 76-83.
Page_Fence_Giants wikipedia entry
Page Fence Giants 1894-1898, courtesy of the Negro League Baseball Players Association.
Richard Bak, “Giants of Adrian may have been best baseball team in Michigan in the 1890s”, Detroit Athletic Club, February 11, 2012.
Baseball in Kalamazoo: Black Teams – Kalamazoo’s Early African American Baseball Teams, courtesy of the Kalamazoo Public Library.
The Page Fence Giants : a history of Black baseball’s pioneering champions / Mitch Lutzke. Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2018.
