7/12/2011:
Barnstorming baseball teams crisscrossed across North Dakota from corner to corner from the 1890s to the 1950s. A bewildering variety of ball clubs, including black teams and major leaguers, followed the railway lines, entertaining townspeople who wanted to see if the local baseball team could defeat a talented traveling team.
One of the novelty teams was the Bloomer Girls – a women’s team that toured North Dakota intermittently from 1899 to 1916. On this date in 1911, Hopkins Brothers Bloomer Girls of Des Moines, Iowa played the local Fargo club. The Hopkins Brothers sporting goods store owned the team and they sent out a man named J.L. Wilkinson to arrange games.
It was an open secret in Fargo that not all of the Bloomer Girls were women. The pitcher and the catcher were men – wearing long-haired wigs – making it possible for the Bloomer team to compete successfully against town teams.
Baseball fans turned out to see if the women ballplayers were very good. Some wanted to see how strong they were, while others wanted to see how lovely they were – because the ladies were billed as “Venuses in form and Amazons in strength.”
The Hopkins Bloomer Girls team promoted the skills of first baseman Carrie Nation – but it was not the famous saloon-breaking prohibitionist who wielded a hatchet. This Carrie Nation was a Chicago woman actually named Mae Arbaugh who took the Carrie Nation name to attract fans.
On the evening of July 12th, Carrie Nation was “the feature of the game,” according to the Fargo Forum, playing first base with great skill and flair. Fargo fans “roundly applauded her work” with the bat and glove.
The Bloomer Girls brought electric arc lights to illuminate that night game; and the Fargo team claimed they were unable to see the baseball in the gloaming. The Bloomer Girls, accustomed to the “glare of electric lights,” won the game handily, 10 to 1.
The Bloomer Girls left Fargo on the team’s private railway car for other games in other places, but ultimately the novelty of seeing a women’s baseball team wore off. The Bloomer Girls faded away, but oddly enough, the man who arranged the 1911 game in Fargo, J.L. Wilkinson, did not. Wilkinson later became famous as the white owner of the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues and was posthumously inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame in 2006.
Dakota Datebook written by Dr. Steve Hoffbeck, History Department, MSU Moorhead.
SOURCES: “Lady Players Here Tonight,” Fargo Forum, July 12, 1911, p. 3.
“Merediths Could Not See The Ball,” Fargo Forum, July 13, 1911, p. 3.
“Lovely Girls To Play Baseball On Road; Hopkins Brothers to Send Touring Team in Private Car,” Waterloo Evening Reporter, April 20, 1909.
“A Bloomer Girl Dead; Mae Arbaugh Played in 6,486 Professional Ball Games,” Kansas City Star, June 20, 1941, p. 3.
Venus in Grand Forks Herald, June 26, 1904.
“Nubs of News,” Grand Forks Herald, August 11, 1899, p. 4; the Bloomer Girls in Bathgate, N.D.
“J.L. Wilkinson,” profile, National Baseball Hall of Fame, http://baseball.org/hof/Wilkinson-jl, accessed on June 23, 2011.