The first game: the ground professional baseball forgot

MAY 4, 1871 · FOUND, WITH A RESIDUE

The game is the best-attested fact in American baseball; its address was forgotten. On May 4, 1871, the Fort Wayne Kekiongas beat the Cleveland Forest Citys 2–0 at the Kekionga Ball Grounds — the first game of the National Association, the first professional league game in America, with Bobby Mathews pitching the shutout. Because Cincinnati's opener the same day was rained out, the first game of professional league baseball happened here. Then the city lost the place. The wooden grandstand — the Grand Duchess, built in May 1870 — burned on November 5, 1871; the Kekiongas folded that season; and as Fort Wayne rebuilt over the grounds, memory blurred into three competing answers, one of them a place that never existed.

The false lead has a name: "Hamilton Field," downtown, where many sources still place the game. The Society for American Baseball Research's park study (Bill Griggs and Jim Nitz) dismantles it: the banker Allen Hamilton let an amateur club use ground behind his house in 1862–63, later writers fused that ground with the Kekiongas' park, and "Hamilton Field" — a ballpark no contemporary record names — entered the books. A second wrong answer stands in bronze and stone: a marker in Headwaters Park credits League Park, a later diamond on the other bank, with the first game; the Kekiongas never played there. The recovery, when it came, was title work. Griggs, a title-insurance man, tracked the legal description of the grounds through the records and fixed them at the old Camp Allen, in the bend of the St. Marys — the peninsula bounded by present Mechanics, Elm, Cherry, Camp Allen Drive, and Fair streets, which the 1871 Fort Wayne Guide Map shows plainly. In November 2016 the News-Sentinel reported local historians still weighing five potential sites; by the following May the argument had settled enough for a monument, unveiled at Camp Allen Park on May 4, 2017, the game's 146th anniversary.

What remains open is the inside of the fence. The precise size and orientation of the Kekionga Ball Grounds are lost; no photograph or sketch of the park survives. The 1871 map gives the boundaries and nothing else, and Griggs himself, asked what remained, pointed at the grandstand: reports of the games describe balls hit into the river, but the St. Marys bends around the ground on two sides, and which side the Grand Duchess stood on — "That location is on my bucket list to solve before I die." The trail ends there: the field found, its furniture gone.

Sources:

1. Bill Griggs and Jim Nitz, "Kekionga Ball Grounds (Fort Wayne, IN)," Society for American Baseball Research ballpark study — the Camp Allen siting, the Hamilton Field error, and the 1871 Guide Map.
2. Blake Sebring, "Indiana baseball group wants monument on historical game site," Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, November 28, 2016 — the five candidate sites as then weighed.
3. "Bill Griggs," Fort Wayne Magazine 20 Questions, May 2017 (FortWayne.com) — the title-search recovery and the grandstand question Griggs left open.
4. Whatzup, "America's pastime goes back in time" (2017) — the monument unveiled at Camp Allen Park on May 4, 2017.