Wilcox County boys faced grand jury indictment for playing baseball in Camden in the summer of 1905

I have always loved baseball. I played Little League, Babe Ruth and high school baseball, and while I was a very average player, I still love the sport. I’m sure a lot of men in the reading audience will know exactly how I feel.

Nowadays, especially this time of year, you can watch a baseball game on television, on a laptop or on your cellphone just about any day of the week. There is no shortage of games to watch when you take into account all of the colleges and professional teams that take the field each and every day. In today’s world, we also don’t give a second thought to sports like baseball being played on Sunday, but this hasn’t always been the case.

Blue laws, which were sometimes called Sunday laws, once existed to prohibit many activities on Sundays, including activities like sports. These laws were passed to encourage people to rest and attend church on Sunday. A common “blue law” that you still see in some places today is the prohibition against alcohol sales on Sundays.

One of the most remarkable blue law incidents in Wilcox County history involved a bunch of young boys and baseball. This happened way back in 1905 when Sunday baseball was pretty much illegal everywhere except for Chicago, Cincinnati and St. Louis. It wasn’t until 1919 that Sunday baseball was legalized in New York City.

In the June 29, 1905 edition of The Wilcox Progressive Era, editor John S. Hunter reported, under the headline “Sunday Ball Players Told to Go Their Way and Sin No More,” that the “cases against the boys who were indicted by the last Grand Jury for playing ball in Camden on Sunday came up before the County Court on Monday, June 26, and the cases were nol prossed on the promise of the participants to play no more ball on Sunday.”

While the story doesn’t mention the names of the boys involved, Hunter did sympathize with them and editorialized about their legal plight.

“The long dreary Sundays in the country are spent in various ways,” Hunter wrote. “With the young, the time hangs heavily on their hands. The old-time, rigid, compulsory methods of bygone days now belong to the past, and young America of today keeps pace with civilization and the customs of the present age.”

Despite my best efforts, I was unable to find any additional information about the 1905 Sunday baseball incident in Camden. Apparently, the paper didn’t publish a story about their original arrests, that is, if the young baseballers were even indeed arrested. Reading between the lines, this incident seemed to have been a hot topic in the community since the court’s final decision was so well publicized.

In the end, please let me hear from you if you have any additional information about this incident. More than likely all of the young boys involved have long since passed away, but no doubt many of their descendants still live in the Camden area today. Who knows, maybe some in the reading audience will remember ol’ grandpa telling them about the time he and his buddies got indicted for playing baseball on a Sunday way back in 1905.