Seth Aikens and Baseball

Charles Aikens died of arteriosclerosis in 1918, when he was 85 years old. Seth was 44 years old, married and a father of three boys. We can assume that he had been running the blacksmith shop for a while. Although Charles was still shoeing oxen for the town of Barnard in 1899, when he was 66 years old, the 1903 Barnard town reports shows Seth being paid for tools and repairs to equipment used in maintaining the town and state roads. In some ways, I can imagine someone hanging on to the way things were until the end of the century, and then being willing to start a new chapter of their life at the dawn of a new era.

I found Seth in the book “Barnard, A Look Back”, published by the Barnard Historical Society in 1982. There is a picture of him standing in front of the blacksmith shop, a picture of him sitting in a lawnchair as an elderly man, with the caption “Seth 'Gramp' Aikens, who was quite a baseball player in his younger days” and in a team portrait, taken around the turn of the century, of the Silver Lake Baseball team. The caption doesn't tell us which player is which, unfortunately. I admit that I tend to wring a lot of meaning out of very little information, but I think this tells us a lot about Seth Aikens. Most importantly, he was popular enough that the whole town called him “Gramp”, in his old age. He had enough leisure time, and athletic ability, to play baseball well into middle age, since he was 36 in 1900. This is the advantage to working with your father – that you had the time to devote to an activity like playing baseball, when many of the farmers in Barnard were working at back-breaking labor 365 days a year.

 

 

 

 

“The Vermont Standard” doesn't mention the Silver Lake Baseball team during the summers that Seth played ball. Baseball is important enough to get some press, though. In the July 23, 1885 issue, there was an announcement that read, “There will be a game of baseball tomorrow between the Woodstocks and The Junctions, and there is talk of a special train over the Woodstock Railroad to transport spectators to the game.” This is interesting. Where was the game – at Woodstock or at White River? What time was the game? What time did the train leave? In an era without telephones, how would you get this information if you wanted to go to the game? Otherwise, you rode your horse and wagon, or your horse and carriage, down to White River or up to Woodstock to watch your team play.

Also during the summer of 1885, the town of Woodstock supplied the boys of the town with a baseball field. “The Standard” states, “In compliance with the citizens, town trustees have prohibited ballplaying in the parks and streets of the village, but, recognizing that the boys must have some place for play, have rented for them, at the expense of the village, the baseball grounds at the fairgrounds.” So in 1885, the town of Woodstock felt that the boys there must have some place to play baseball, and found them a place to play where they wouldn't annoy the rest of the town.

Woodstock must have been quite a baseball town. An obituary in the Vermont Standard of July 24, 1890 tells a sad tale of a baseball related death. It seems that on July 17^th, James Hazzard and Charles Pratt had gone to a baseball game in Lebanon between the “Woodstock Nine” and the Lebanon team. The next day, the went on a fishing trip, to a pond in Grafton, New Hampshire. While fishing on the pond, their boat capsized. Charles Pratt made it to shore but James Hazzard drowned. The obituary goes on to add the interesting detail that James Hazzard's father, “UncleTom Hazzard”, was a colored man who had originally lived in Barnard and later moved to Woodstock.