Baseball stories are frequently too good to be true, or too true to be good.

A tale about a Maine baseball romp in 1867 between the Norway Pennesseewassees and Bowdoin College pitched to the Hebron Historical Society this week was a home run.

Historian Larry Glatz admitted that he had employed subterfuge to get an audience to the Town Office on Tuesday to hear his presentation titled, “Was Baseball Invented in Hebron?”

“I have to say that I stole that topic from a writer named Will Anderson,” Glatz told the audience, “who back in 1996 or so wrote a book called, ‘Was Baseball Invented in Maine?’ Right off on the first page he says the origins of baseball are quite obscure, and people argue about it, and some say this, and some say that, and since there’s so much indecision and lack of documentation, you can almost claim baseball was invented anywhere; so I’m claiming Maine.”

Glatz might have just as well have claimed Hebron, after all, because he said Hebron Academy was populated with early adopters of the game, and it became a training ground for talented players that combined their skills into tight bonds of team play.

“There was early on some very interesting baseball activity going on in Hebron that became important in Maine,” Glatz said, “and also in New England generally, to sort of solidify baseball as the so-called national pastime, and the sport that everybody wanted to become involved in. So Hebron actually did have some early interesting connections to the larger picture of baseball in Maine.”

Glatz said the first reference he could find of an actual game in Maine of base ball, before the two words were welded together in almost Germanic fashion, happened between Bowdoin College and a team from Topsham in 1860, which as Glatz noted, was one year before the start of the Civil War.

“The reason I mention the Civil War is that these young men, who were just beginning to play this sport called base ball, ended up by the hundreds of thousands in the army all over the country, with lots of hard work to do, but then (there were) days and days … of nothing to do but sit around camp and get bored,” Glatz said. “The process of the Civil War soldiers coming home to all different parts of the country, and needing something to while away the time, really spread baseball … to the entire country,” he said.

Glatz has been able to trace individual Hebron Academy base ball players who went off to fight in the war, survived, and came back to Maine to play, and frankly promote, the game again. He demonstrated that an 11-member post-war town team from Norway named the Pennesseewassees included seven Hebron base ball alumni, and four were Civil War veterans. Three players were both.

“Basically the Pennesseewassees team was the Hebron Academy Herculeans team; they just changed the name,” Glatz said.

Glatz said the firecracker development of, and frenetic interest in, town teams in Maine following the Civil War became wildly explosive when a championship trophy was commissioned from Boston in the shape of a silver ball. Rivalries grew exponentially during the growth period, he said.

There was a team from Portland called the Eons, Glatz noted, and they were the first team in Maine to win possession of the new and coveted silver ball trophy.

“One of the rules of the organization was that you had to accept challenges from the other teams for the silver ball,” Glantz said, “and you had to accept it within something like 30 days to play the game.”

The Eons accepted a challenge from the Bowdoin College team, and lost possession of the silver ball to the Brunswick students, Glatz said.

Bowdoin was quickly challenged by multiple Maine teams to wrestle away possession of the silver ball, “and Bowdoin chose the Pennesseewassees, because they felt they would be the easiest team to beat,” Glatz said.

The game was held at Brunswick on Oct. 19, 1867.

“And Bowdoin thought they were pretty good, and they thought these farmers were going to come down from some hill someplace,” Glatz said. “They weren’t exactly sure where they were from.”

Frank Hawthorne, brother to Nathaniel, reported on the game in the book, “Tales of Bowdoin,” Glatz said.

“He says: ‘What a scene. A regular donnybrook fair in miniature. What a crowd too. They had come from all over the whole town, and a good part of Topsham had turned out. Of course it seemed as if every livery team in Bath, Lewiston and Freeport had been called into commission for the occasion, with nearly all the farm wagons in the intervening country thrown in for good measure.

‘On both sides of the Delta (where the games were played,) the Bath Road and the Harpswell Road were jammed full of teams. And the cavalcade stretched way down into the pines and opposite the Dunlap monument. The grandstand was filled to overflowing with students and “college girls.”‘

“Of course ‘college girls’ is in quotes because there weren’t any actual girls in college but they were the girls around the college,” Glatz explained.

Quoting Frank Hawthorne, Glatz said, “‘So the college girls in Brunswick, every window in the medical cell had been preempted and the Yaggers (which were locals) swung from the branches of every nearby tree. One of the professors called the team and asked, Who is this team? They are the puny sawhorses, also called the phenomenal farmers, and somebody said they can bat, but they field like oxen. The Bowdoin players said they would place the silver ball in a glass case, so it wouldn’t get dirty by the farmers.'”

A retrospective published years later in the Lewiston Journal by Carrie Tucker reported, “The Norway lads had no idea of winning the game until they had admired the silver ball, which was in a silk-lined jeweler’s case and looked very attractive. As they were admiring it, some of the Bowdoin boys told them how they were going to have it kept in a glass case and had picked out the place where it should be kept for the admiration of future generations. This riled the Norway boys and they decided ‘to go to it’ and win if possible.”

Win they did, and it was pretty much a rout. The final score was Pennesseewassees 29, Bowdoin 8. The Norway boys had a bases-loaded triple play in the third inning and two double plays late. The score at the end of the first inning was 4-0, and never seesawed. Bowdoin “choked,” not able to score a run in several innings, apparently dazzled by the spinning underhanded pitches delivered in their direction by Norway’s Gene Fuller, Glatz said.

The Norway boys caught an early train home, toting the silver ball of course, to a hero’s welcome at the train station. The team was able to keep their treasure over the winter, but through a series of challenges and mishaps, the silver ball ended up next season with the Eons of Portland, Glatz said, “and it hasn’t been seen since.”

Vanished.

“Going back to the beginning of my talk, was baseball really invented in Hebron?” he asked.

“Of course it wasn’t invented in Hebron, but I do think that it would make a good case for saying that these guys from Hebron Academy, who played organized baseball earlier than just about anybody else in the state, did make a huge impression. They sort of fixed in the minds the notion of league baseball that we can follow, that we will have champions, and it will happen every year.

“It’s the same time at the end of the Civil War, when the Grange is starting up, and lots of civic organizations and picnics start to happen, and tourism begins,” Glatz said. “It’s a whole different era of how people spent their spare time, and I think that the Hebron Academy Herculeans made a good contribution, so we can thank them for that.”

rhaverinen@sunjournal.com

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