No statistics were kept, not even who won and lost. No championship series, no all-star game. No local newspaper published a box score or even a squib about a game. In many of my conversations with black baseball players through the years, this phrase recurs: "We played for fun."
Organized Negro baseball didn't begin in earnest in the Virginia Piedmont until the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Sunday games became an accepted norm. Most blacks in Loudoun County worked six days a week well into the 1950s.
But a team remembered only as "Milton Lee's" was around in the early 1900s, according to Shirley Piggott, a Silcott's Springs farmer who got about the county, probably making it the oldest Negro club in Loudoun.
"Lee and his kin made up most of the team," Piggott told me many years ago. "They'd play the white summer guests at the Silcott's Springs boardinghouses."
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Lee lived in a cabin in the North Fork Creek floodplain, and except for the diamond, the baseball field remains there just south of the ford that interrupts Jeb Stuart Road.
"We called the road Milton Lee's Road because he kept up the ford," Piggott told me. But in November 1962, on the 100th anniversary of a small skirmish at Philomont involving the Confederate forces of Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, local whites changed the name to Jeb Stuart Road.
Asbury Lloyd, who lived near Philomont, started his baseball career as a teenager in the early 1940s when Lee was but a memory. Most blacks in the country didn't play baseball on a field before their teens because Negro primary schools, all one- and two-roomers, didn't have ballfields.
Loudoun High, the Negro high school in the then-segregated county, had a diamond in front of its building on North Street. The outfield was in Union Cemetery, and players had to maneuver around the tombstones.
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In Fauquier County, the Bartenstein family permitted blacks to play on their land adjacent to the black Rosenwald School, which offered high-school courses. Only a few black youngsters commuted to or boarded at Manassas Industrial School, the one accredited area high school, which had a fine baseball field.
Fewer than one in 10 blacks went beyond seventh grade because the youngsters were needed at home or on the farm. That included Lloyd, who told me that he and a black friend, Harry Warner, and a group of whites once walked the five miles to Middleburg in the early 1940s to play baseball on the field for whites.
The caretaker "told us the whites could play, but Warner and myself could not," Lloyd said. "So the white boys decided they wouldn't play either, and we all walked home."
After a few years warming the bench, then subbing at various positions, Lloyd became a pitcher for Middleburg's Negro team, the Braves. "We modeled our uniforms, blue and white, after those of the Boston Braves," Lloyd told me.
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Lloyd, a right-hander, described his pitches as "a lot of junk, and I had a curve that really broke. They call it a slider today. I had a lot of control. I was called a stopper."
Once, during a game at the Aldie team's field, which was not at Aldie but near Charlie Willis's store on the Carolina Road, a major league scout came to look over an Aldie catcher.
"They decided they didn't want him, and the scout saw me loosening up," Lloyd said. "I was throwing my best stuff. 'How old are you?' the scout said. 'Thirty-two,' I replied. 'Too bad,' he said. 'If you were 25, I'd give you a chance and tell 'em you were 22.' "
Lloyd's younger brother, Theodore, a "no-hit, good-field" shortstop for Middleburg, also was scouted by the majors but, Asbury said, didn't take it seriously and never attended a tryout.
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The Lloyds and two sets of brothers accounted for Middleburg's being the finest of area black baseball teams in the 1940s and early 1950s. The brothers were Duke and Dulany "Bud" Warner, a pitcher and catcher, respectively, and Eddie and Rob Cook. Eddie pitched, and Rob played outfield.
"Cooley Edwards, the catcher for the white [Middleburg] team wanted to play us on their field in about 1955," Asbury Lloyd said, "but Mr. [Stephen] Clark [Jr.], who owned the field, wouldn't let us play there."
In 1934, Clark refurbished Clark's Field, opposite his Boxwood estate just inside the Fauquier line south of Middleburg. Clark said he felt a vested interest in white baseball because his father had donated his extensive collection of baseball memorabilia to an organization that founded the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1939.
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Edwards persisted. "His team wanted to play us so bad," Lloyd said, and he finally got Clark to relent but only when Clark said neither team should wear uniforms. That way, if Clark got flak from diehard segregationists, he could say that it was just a pickup game that he had nothing to do with. "I believe they [the white team] won," Lloyd recalled.
Horace N. "Mutt" Lassiter, a catcher who at 15 was the youngest player on the Purcellville Athletics, or "ACs," as he called them, remembered an away-and-home series against a white Strasburg team in the mid-1950s. "We beat them 5-3 at Strasburg and 23-0 at Fireman's Field under the lights," Lassiter said. "They'd never played at night before."
After the rout, the firefighters who owned the Purcellville field wouldn't allow more games between white and black teams, he said.
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The ACs' regular field, with its downhill slope in right field and dirt lane running through left field, was at the town's Emancipation Grounds, but in 1951, the firefighters let the black team use their field for night games at the urging of Marine Corps Col. Frank Tyson.
Tyson, who was often away from his home south of Lincoln, had asked Lassiter to stay with his son, Frank. Lassiter and the family became good friends. Tyson believed that the black team, which by the early 1950s began to vie with Middleburg as the county's finest black ball club, needed to play on a professional field.
Purcellville's rise, according to several former players, was due to the management and coaching of Gordon "Dick" Lee and then his brother, Tony. The Lees were great-nephews of Milton Lee. Most other black teams had players who also coached or managed. "Who was coach depended on who showed up for the game," Lloyd said.
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Lassiter's first-inning three-run home run against the Homestead Grays, the legendary Negro team, was a highlight of his career. The ACs defeated the Grays, 3-1, in 1954 behind the pitching of Hamilton's Ernest Chinn. "But they [the Grays] were then over the hill," Lassiter said. "They no longer had Jackie Robinson and [Roy] Campanella."
Lassiter and teammate Mack Lee Simms then hitchhiked to Charles Town, W.Va., where the Pittsburgh Pirates were holding tryouts. "Simms was cut because he tried out for the wrong position, first base," Lassiter said. "He should have tried out for pitcher. He was one of the best pitchers ever to come through here."
Lassiter, then a junior at Douglass High School in Leesburg, was assigned to a minor league team. "But then I broke a finger playing football, and that ended things," he said.
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A team that had Purcellville's number was the Arlington Athletics. Under the lights at Fireman's Field, they beat their namesakes, 3-2, even though left-hander Simms struck out 23 batters.
Charles Roberts, a fastballing right-hander who pitched for the Purcellville Athletics, recalled that on his 21st birthday -- July 5, 1959 -- he struck out 21 Arlington Athletics only to lose, 2-1.
As that game was played at Fireman's Field, I thought there might be a snippet about it in the Loudoun Times-Mirror sports pages. There wasn't a word, though there were nearly complete batting statistics of the white Loudoun Baseball League, full box scores of its games and even reports of Little League and Babe Ruth League action. None of their games was as dramatic as those of the black teams.
Kelly Peach of Leesburg, a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates, saw Roberts pitch and told him to try out for the Salem (Va.) Pirates. But while warming up at Salem, Roberts developed a sore shoulder, ending his professional baseball hopes.
Waterford's John Middleton, who played first and second base for Purcellville, recalled that in the late 1940s, the team made the newspapers -- in Martinsburg, W.Va. The ACs had driven to Berkeley County to play a white Hedgesville team. The game went 17 innings before Purcellville won, 1-0, behind pitchers Jimmy "Speed" Campbell and Bernard Lee, youngest of the Lee brothers.
Middleton played for Waterford from 1934 to 1946, when it disbanded, and said its field was in the Catoctin Creek bottom near the old mill dam.
"We push-mowed the infield before each game," he said. "The cows pretty well had taken care of the outfield," but the outfielders had to dodge dung patties. A stake with a white rag marked the foul lines.
Asbury Lloyd described the pitcher's mound at Cross Creek, near a dance hall and beer joint of the same name, "five or six miles out of Warrenton on the Lee Highway," as "a groundhog hole." At the White Post field in Clarke County, he said, outfielders had to dodge the many limestone outcrops that mark the Shenandoah Valley landscape. "Some were bigger than this chair," he told me recently at breakfast in Purcellville.
"At Millwood [Clarke County]," he said, "you couldn't see the left fielder from home plate. If you saw a ball being thrown back, you assumed he caught it. We used to kid 'em that they had a bushel full of baseballs out there."
Lloyd described the outfield at Leesburg's W.S. Gibbons pasture, part of which became Douglass High School's field in 1941, as "so full of bull thistles, three and four feet tall, that I guarantee you if you ran into one, you would miss the ball."
He and others liked to play at Tripp's Field in Upperville. "It was the only field that had a dugout for the players, and we felt like we were professionals," Lloyd said. "But we'd play anywhere."
Lassiter had no qualms with Bowman's Field near the black village of Bowmantown, where Aldie played home games, but said, "The woods were full of gamblers and bootleggers."
Games at most fields attracted 150 on a good day, Lloyd recalled, but night games at the two fireman's fields attracted 200 to 300 fans. They paid a $1 admission, with most of the money going to the firefighters to pay the electric bill. Lassiter remembered a rare $1,000 gate, with the proceeds going to charity.
Admission at the black teams' home fields was usually 50 cents in the 1940s and 1950s, twice that of the Depression years of the previous decade. But if one had only a quarter or 30 cents, the gatekeeper would let the person in. Often a hat was passed. Proceeds went to buy baseballs -- "we used three a game," Middleton said -- bats, spiked shoes and uniforms. Many teams, including Waterford, couldn't afford uniforms.
Black churches and social clubs usually sold 10-cent hot dogs and 10-cent colas at the games. Leesburg had a Coca-Cola bottling plant, and a 24-bottle case could be had for 60 or 70 cents. On occasion, a 25-cent chicken sandwich was the treat.
The lone umpire behind home plate was not paid, though when Gaither Lucas umpired, youngsters gathered around him, for the Round Hill pitcher had been a legend of local organized Negro baseball in its initial years.
Hall's Park, on the outskirts of the black village of Macsville, held the oldest of the Negro baseball fields. The grounds, today called Mickey Gordon Park for the man who organized and coached the Middleburg Babe Ruth team (initially white in 1956), had been established in the late teens by black builder Will Hall. The park was home to the Middleburg Braves.
Doubleheaders were held on the park's three galas -- Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and the Odd Fellows' Turn Out Day, the first Friday in September. Admission rose from 50 cents to $1.50 in the late 1940s, but one also could take in the marching bands and horse races.
About 300 blacks, one-fifth of the population, lived in Leesburg in the 1930s through the 1950s. But in the mid- to late 1950s, the town had three black baseball teams.
Frank Watkins, longtime gatekeeper and booster of black baseball, said the first team of record in Leesburg in the 1920s, and possibly before, was the Raggedy Nines. By the early 1930s, it became the Ever Readys, and when the younger Trojans came along a few years later, the Ever Readys remained as the "45-and-up team," as Watkins put it.
While the Trojans played on Phillips's Field next to Silas Phillips's motel and eatery on South King Street, the Ever Readys played on Gibbons's Field. Tony Hughes's Cubs, the blacks' counter to the white Little Leaguers and Babe Ruth teams, also played at Gibbons's Field.
Watkins recalled that while the Ever Readys drew crowds of only about 100, two leading white Loudoun residents, John Gibson, founder of Leesburg Hospital, and Circuit Court Judge John Richard Henry "J.R.H." Alexander, often attended games.
They had grown up with the Ever Readys, and in 1935, Alexander had appointed team manager Gus Valentine as the first black to be listed on Loudoun's jury rolls. Carrie Valentine, Gus's wife, had been the longtime Alexander family maid.
The Ever Readys stopped playing in the early 1950s because of the players' ages. Young people couldn't find work, and the black population was decreasing in the rural Virginia Piedmont.
By the mid-1960s, the black baseball teams were in leagues that were run by the county's new departments of parks and recreation and included teams black and white. "People started to pay players," Lloyd said, but he did not elaborate. Lassiter told me, "There was always something passed under the table."
Eugene Scheel is a Waterford historian and mapmaker.
Former baseball players, from left, Asbury Lloyd, Horace "Mutt" Lassiter and Frank Watkins gather at Robinson's Barber Shop in Leesburg. They were members of Loudoun County's numerous black baseball clubs.
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