The Rockford Peaches Before A League of Their Own

For millions of people, the Rockford Peaches began in 1992. That was the year Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own arrived in theaters, with Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell turning a largely forgotten chapter of American sports history into one of the most beloved baseball movies ever made. Rockford suddenly had a famous baseball team again. Except Rockford had already loved the Peaches once. Long before Hollywood recreated them, people were buying tickets at Beyer Stadium, reading about the team in the local newspapers, following batting races and pennant races, celebrating individual players and turning out by the thousands for important games. The real Rockford Peaches weren't a movie story. They were Rockford's ballclub.

Opening Day, 1943

The Peaches arrived during an extraordinary moment in American life. World War II had taken thousands of professional baseball players into military service. Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley helped organize a women's professional league partly from concern that the war might seriously disrupt major-league baseball. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League began in 1943 with four teams: the Racine Belles, Kenosha Comets, South Bend Blue Sox and Rockford Peaches. Rockford was therefore not a later expansion city or a convenient name attached to somebody else's history. The Peaches were there at the beginning, and Rockford and South Bend would become the only two cities represented during all twelve seasons of the league, from 1943 through 1954.

The Peaches opened their first season at Rockford's 15th Avenue stadium on May 30, 1943, against South Bend. The ballpark later became known as Beyer Stadium. This was not quite the baseball shown in A League of Their Own. The early league was deliberately positioned somewhere between softball and baseball. The ball was larger, the pitching distance shorter, and underhand pitching was initially required. Over the years, the rules evolved steadily toward conventional baseball. Whatever uncertainty existed about what to call the game, however, the women playing it were professional athletes, and Rockford learned that quickly. Gladys "Terrie" Davis won the league's first batting championship in 1943 with a .332 average, while Rockford pitcher Olive Little threw the first no-hitter in league history that August.

Did Rockford Actually Care?

This is perhaps the most interesting question from our distance of more than eighty years. Were the Peaches primarily a wartime novelty? Did Rockford residents politely attend games because women's baseball was something unusual to see? The attendance figures suggest something considerably stronger. A history preserved by Midway Village Museum reports that nearly 895,000 paid admissions were recorded for Peaches games during the team's first ten seasons, from 1943 through 1952. That is an extraordinary number for a city Rockford's size during that period, and the surviving accounts describe overflow crowds and a community that had developed a genuine attachment to its team.

Consider what happened on August 6, 1944, when Rockford held an "Olive Little Night" honoring the Peaches pitcher. More than 3,100 fans came to the ballpark. That single crowd pushed Rockford's 1944 attendance past its entire 1943 attendance total, with roughly a month still remaining in the season. Four years later, in September 1948, the Peaches faced Racine in the Western Division championship playoffs at Beyer Stadium. More than 3,700 fans watched Rockford win 3-1 behind clutch hitting from Eleanor Callow. By then the war had been over for three years. Major League Baseball was fully operating again, the men had returned home, and the original wartime justification for women's professional baseball was disappearing. Rockford kept coming to the ballpark.

That is an important distinction. A novelty is something people go see once so they can say they saw it. A baseball team becomes part of a city when people return again and again, know the standings, recognize the players, worry about injuries, remember yesterday's loss and care about tomorrow's game. By that measure, the Peaches had become something much more substantial than wartime entertainment.

Rockford Knew the Players

The players themselves became recognizable local sports personalities. There was Dorothy "Kammie" Kamenshek at first base, regarded as one of the finest players in league history, and Dorothy "Snookie" Harrell at shortstop. There were pitchers Carolyn "India" Morris and Olive Little. Later came stars including Eleanor Callow, Lois Florreich, Rose Gacioch and Helen Nicol. These weren't anonymous women wearing identical peach-colored dresses. Rockford fans knew who could hit, who could steal a base, who should be pitching and who was in a slump.

The local newspapers increasingly treated the Peaches as a team whose performance required serious sports coverage. Contemporary Rockford newspaper material survives discussing individual matchups, performances and even arguments over who was the better pitcher in the league. That may tell us more about the team's place in Rockford than almost anything else. Once fans start arguing about players, questioning decisions and comparing statistics, the experiment is over. You have a sports culture.

Then They Started Winning

It probably didn't hurt that the Peaches became extremely good. Rockford won its first league championship in 1945, finishing the regular season 67-43 before winning the postseason. Then came one of the great runs in the history of the league. The Peaches won championships in 1948, 1949 and 1950, giving Rockford three consecutive titles and four championships altogether. No team in league history won more.

Imagine being a Rockford baseball fan during those years. You could walk into Beyer Stadium and watch one of the best women's baseball teams in the country and, very often, simply the best one. There was another professional baseball team in Rockford during part of this period. The men's Rockford Rox played minor-league baseball nearby from 1947 through 1949, with schedules arranged so the Rox and Peaches wouldn't create conflicts at the adjoining facilities. The Rox struggled financially, became a road-only team late in the 1949 season and then disappeared. The Peaches kept playing.

There is something worth lingering over in that fact. Women's professional baseball had supposedly been created as a temporary answer to a wartime problem. In Rockford, it outlasted the men's minor-league team.

The Peach Orchard

Beyer Stadium became the center of this little baseball universe. The Peaches called it the "Peach Orchard." It stood on 15th Avenue, about a mile from downtown, and for twelve summers it was part of ordinary Rockford life. It is worth trying to imagine the place without the layer of nostalgia that now surrounds it: people arriving after work from Rockford neighborhoods, kids in the stands, vendors working the crowd, players warming up, the lights coming on and that peculiar excitement that exists in a small ballpark when a few thousand people are paying attention to exactly the same thing.

A recollection of a 1951 Peaches game preserved by Midway Village captures precisely that atmosphere: Dottie Ferguson Key stepping toward the plate, vendors calling through the crowd, teammates exchanging signals and spectators roaring when the action began. Nothing about the scene would have seemed particularly historical to the people experiencing it. That may be the most difficult thing for us to recover. The Peaches weren't history yet. They were tonight's game.

The End

The league's greatest success came in the late 1940s, when attendance across the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League reached more than 900,000 in 1948. But professional entertainment was changing. Television was entering American homes, Major League Baseball was thriving again, and operating a league whose teams traveled throughout the Midwest was expensive. Attendance declined, and by 1954 the economics had become increasingly difficult. League documents indicated that individual clubs needed approximately 45,000 fans that season merely to break even, and the league finished the year with an operating deficit.

The Rockford Peaches played their final season in 1954. There was no grand historical conclusion because nobody yet knew exactly what was ending. There would simply be no 1955 season. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was finished, and then something curious happened: America began to forget.

Before Hollywood

The Peaches never completely disappeared in Rockford memory. Former players remembered, fans remembered, and families remembered going to Beyer Stadium. Nationally, however, the league receded from popular culture. That changed dramatically with A League of Their Own. The movie performed an enormous service by returning women's professional baseball to American memory, but it also created an odd historical effect in Rockford. The fictional Peaches became more famous than the real ones.

Jimmy Dugan never managed the Rockford Peaches. Dottie Hinson wasn't their star catcher. Kit Keller didn't pitch for Rockford. The famous championship game at the end of the movie didn't happen. Rockford didn't even reach the championship series during the league's inaugural 1943 season; the real Peaches won their first title two years later. The movie is fiction built around something that, from a Rockford perspective, is considerably more interesting: Rockford actually did this.

For twelve years, women came from across the United States and Canada to play professional baseball wearing Rockford across their chests. People here bought tickets, learned the players' names, celebrated their stars, complained about losses and watched pennant races. They packed Beyer Stadium for playoff games, and four times they watched their team become champions. Today people travel to Rockford because they saw A League of Their Own and want to find the place where the Peaches played. That's wonderful, but it reverses the chronology. The movie did not teach Rockford to care about the Peaches. It helped the rest of America remember something Rockford had already cared about.

The best way to understand that may be to strip away the movie altogether and imagine a warm night in Rockford in 1948. There are more than 3,700 people gathered around a baseball diamond on 15th Avenue. Rockford is playing Racine in the playoffs. Eleanor Callow comes to the plate with two outs, drives in the tying run and later knocks in two more. The crowd erupts. Nobody there is watching history. Nobody knows Tom Hanks will someday yell that there's no crying in baseball. Nobody knows anyone will make a movie about any of this.

They're watching the Rockford Peaches, and they want their team to win.

 

Before Hull-House: Jane Addams in Rockford

When Jane Addams arrived in Rockford as a young woman, Hull-House did not exist. She had not won the Nobel Peace Prize. She had not become one of America's most influential social reformers, a leader of the international peace movement, or one of the foundational figures in the development of modern social work.

She was a student.

In 1877, the seventeen-year-old Addams came to Rockford Female Seminary, the institution that would eventually become Rockford College and, much later, Rockford University. Her father had insisted on Rockford, despite his daughter's desire to attend an eastern college. It turned out to be one of those decisions whose consequences become much easier to see looking backward.

Because some of the roots of Jane Addams's extraordinary life were planted in Rockford.

Rockford Female Seminary

Rockford Female Seminary itself was already a remarkable institution. Chartered by the Illinois legislature in 1847, when Rockford had a population of only about 2,500 people, it was created during a period when the idea that women should receive the same rigorous higher education available to men was still controversial.

Rockford residents pledged $3,500 toward the new school. Its first classes were held in the old downtown courthouse before the seminary established a campus between the Rock River and Seminary Street. That is important to remember when imagining Jane Addams in Rockford: she did not attend classes on the present-day Rockford University campus. The college would not move to the east side of the city until the 1960s.

The Rockford that educated Jane Addams was a nineteenth-century river city, and the school she attended stood much closer to its center.

Under the leadership of Anna Peck Sill, Rockford Female Seminary offered women an unusually serious education. Sill had come west with an ambitious idea about what women were intellectually capable of doing, and Addams later remembered her with enormous respect.

That environment appears to have suited Addams.

She became president of her class. She was involved in debate. She became literary editor of the Rockford Seminary Magazine, which had published an early essay of hers in 1878. The young woman who would eventually write books, deliver speeches around the world and argue publicly about poverty, democracy, war and the responsibilities of citizenship was already learning how to formulate an argument and put it before an audience in Rockford.

And she wasn't the only consequential person there.

The Rockford Women Who Went to Hull-House

At Rockford Female Seminary, Addams met Ellen Gates Starr.

That friendship became one of the most important relationships of Addams's life. In 1889, Addams and Starr established Hull-House in Chicago, creating what became one of the most famous settlement houses in the United States.

Another Rockford Female Seminary student, Julia Lathrop, later joined them at Hull-House. Lathrop went on to become a nationally important social reformer and the first chief of the United States Children's Bureau. Rockford University still identifies Starr and Lathrop among the important Rockford connections surrounding Addams and Hull-House.

That makes the local connection considerably more interesting than saying Jane Addams "went to college in Rockford."

Part of the human network that became Hull-House was formed here.

Before there was a Hull-House in Chicago, there were young women meeting one another at Rockford Female Seminary.

The Valedictorian Who Wanted to Change Her Own School

Addams graduated from the seminary on June 22, 1881, as part of a class of seventeen women who called themselves the "Glorious Seventeen."

She was the class valedictorian.

And Addams used the occasion for something more substantial than saying goodbye.

In her valedictory address, she challenged the seminary's trustees to respond to the students' growing demand that Rockford Female Seminary become a fully accredited college capable of granting bachelor's degrees. She told her classmates that they stood united in a belief in "beauty, genius and courage," and in the ability of those things to transform the world.

The following year, Rockford Female Seminary awarded its first bachelor's degrees.

Jane Addams received one of them.

There is something wonderfully characteristic about the episode. The woman who would spend much of her adult life arguing that institutions could be made better was already challenging an institution she cared about while she was still a student inside it.

Rockford Female Seminary became Rockford College in 1892.

Addams, meanwhile, went on to something much larger.

From Rockford to Hull-House

In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull-House in a mansion on Chicago's Near West Side.

Its work eventually encompassed education, childcare, labor reform, public health, arts and culture, assistance to immigrants and investigations of the conditions under which Chicago's working poor lived. Addams became one of the country's best-known reformers.

Her concerns expanded beyond Chicago. She became deeply involved in the peace movement and helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1931, she received the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Rockford remained part of her story.

More than forty years after her graduation, Addams returned to Rockford College for its 75th anniversary.

On June 14, 1922, she delivered a commencement address titled A New Challenge to the Scholar. By then she was sixty-one years old and internationally famous. Yet she began by looking backward.

She remembered Anna Peck Sill.

She remembered the old Rockford Female Seminary.

And she remembered the radical idea underlying the institution in the first place: that women deserved serious higher education.

"There is something about milestones," Addams told the audience, that causes people to reflect upon the past. She described Sill as a pioneer and spoke about the courage required to establish such a school in the West in 1847.

It must have been an extraordinary circle to complete.

The young woman who had once stood before the trustees asking them to imagine something larger for their school returned four decades later as one of the most famous women in America.

Jane Addams's Rockford

Today, it is easy to associate Jane Addams almost entirely with Chicago. Hull-House deserves that prominence. It became the center of her life's work and secured her place in American history.

But there is an earlier chapter.

It happened in Rockford.

Jane Addams learned here. She wrote here. She debated here. She formed friendships here. She challenged the institution educating her to become something more ambitious. Some of the women who would later help build the Hull-House movement were women she knew from Rockford Female Seminary.

Even the geography of the story has largely disappeared. The campus where Addams studied is gone, and Rockford College eventually migrated across the city before becoming Rockford University in 2013. But the institutional line remains unbroken: Rockford Female Seminary became Rockford College, and Rockford College became Rockford University.

The university's archives today preserve Jane Addams material as well as papers connected to other Hull-House women, including Julia Lathrop.

Rockford sometimes has a peculiar relationship with its own history. Events of national importance can happen here, or people of national importance can emerge from here, without becoming deeply embedded in the way the city thinks about itself.

Jane Addams should be an exception.

Before Hull-House, before the international peace movement, before the Nobel Prize, there was a seventeen-year-old girl arriving at a small women's seminary beside the Rock River.

Four years later, she stood before her classmates and told them that beauty, genius and courage could transform the world.

Then she spent the rest of her life trying to prove it.

 

The 1928 Rockford Tornado: The Afternoon a Tornado Tore Through the City

On the afternoon of September 14, 1928, Rockford was struck by one of the deadliest tornadoes in the city's history. At approximately 3:20 p.m., a tornado touched down on the south side of Rockford, east of the Rock River and just south of Harrison Avenue. From there it began moving northeast, directly toward populated neighborhoods and some of Rockford's busiest industrial districts.

By the time it was over, 14 people were dead, at least 100 were injured, factories had partially collapsed, houses had been destroyed or moved from their foundations, and a trail of wreckage stretched out of Rockford and across the countryside toward Boone and McHenry counties. Nearly a century later, many of the streets along the tornado's route remain familiar Rockford addresses.

A "Huge Blue Curtain"

One of the remarkable things about the 1928 tornado is that eyewitness descriptions survive. Two men watching the storm approach described what they saw as a "huge blue curtain with small black dots." Those dots were almost certainly debris being carried through the air by the storm.

In 1928 there was no Doppler radar watching rotation develop over Winnebago County, no cell-phone alerts, and no outdoor warning system comparable to what Rockford residents know today. Tornado forecasting itself was still primitive. For many people in the tornado's path, the first warning was simply what they could see and hear approaching them.

After touching down south of Harrison Avenue, the tornado began damaging houses and farm buildings. Four people were injured when one house was badly damaged, and another person who had been caught outside was killed. The tornado then continued northeast toward one of the places where it could do the most damage: industrial Rockford.

Disaster at the Rockford Chair and Furniture Company

One of the worst tragedies occurred at Factory B of the Rockford Chair and Furniture Company along Peoples Avenue, west of Kishwaukee Street. The tornado struck the factory with tremendous force, collapsing the roof and multiple walls while workers were still inside. Eight people died at the factory and at least 40 more were injured.

Contemporary accounts describe rescuers digging through the ruined building looking for survivors. Employees from the nearby Chappel Brothers packing plant reportedly rushed to the scene and organized themselves into rescue squads. For a city whose identity and economy were deeply connected to furniture manufacturing, the destruction must have been particularly shocking. This wasn't a tornado crossing an empty field outside town. It was moving directly through the places where Rockford people worked.

Three Children Trying to Get Home

The tornado continued northeast across Kishwaukee Street and into residential neighborhoods. As it approached 7th Street, the damage became particularly severe, with houses destroyed or pushed from their foundations. Then came perhaps the most heartbreaking event of the afternoon.

A roof was ripped from a building and carried several blocks through the air. Three children who were attempting to get home were struck and killed by the falling debris. The tornado continued toward another of Rockford's major industrial areas, striking the National Lock Company, Union Furniture Company and Mechanics Machine Company along 18th Avenue.

At Union Furniture, portions of the roof and floors collapsed and two workers were killed. Elsewhere, windows shattered, walls collapsed, and businesses, houses, a service station and a grocery store were damaged or destroyed. The tornado was cutting diagonally through a working city filled with people who had begun the afternoon at factories, businesses, schools and homes with no idea of what was approaching.

Across Broadway and Toward Charles Street

The storm continued northeast. Near Broadway and 13th Street, the front wall of the National Furniture Company collapsed into the street, while the Elco Tool Company also suffered major structural damage. The tornado then crossed Woodruff Avenue and entered the Rockview neighborhood, where homes lost roofs, windows and siding.

Two houses were reportedly blown completely from their foundations and deposited in the middle of 9th Avenue near 19th Street. The Carlson Roofing Company building along Charles Street was destroyed. From there, the tornado began moving away from Rockford's densely populated neighborhoods and into the countryside.

Farms along State Street and Guilford Road were damaged as the storm continued northeast. It passed north of Poplar Grove and northwest of Capron before eventually reaching the vicinity of the Boone-McHenry county line. The known tornado path was approximately 26 miles long, and the entire event lasted only about 45 minutes.

And Then Came the Water

Rockford wasn't finished with the storm even after the tornado passed. The same severe weather produced flash flooding along Keith Creek. Roads flooded and buildings were surrounded by water, while photographs from the aftermath show automobiles sitting in floodwater and neighborhoods inundated along the creek.

Residents were therefore dealing with tornado wreckage and flooding at the same time. Hundreds of people were left homeless, and damage to factories temporarily deprived some Rockford families of their livelihoods. The Illinois National Guard's 129th Infantry Regiment was sent to Rockford to assist with the aftermath.

How Strong Was the 1928 Rockford Tornado?

The tornado is sometimes described as an F4. Tornado historian Thomas Grazulis later classified it at that level using the Fujita Scale, which would place it among exceptionally violent tornadoes. There is, however, an important wrinkle when attempting to rate a tornado that occurred decades before the Fujita Scale even existed.

The National Weather Service conducted a modern historical reassessment of the damage and determined that surviving evidence supports at least EF3-level damage. Photographs and written descriptions from 1928 cannot provide investigators with all the structural information available following a modern tornado, so assigning an exact modern rating nearly a century later inevitably involves some uncertainty.

Whatever label is attached to it, the physical results aren't ambiguous. Fourteen people died and at least 100 were injured. Factories collapsed, homes were destroyed, and parts of southeast and east Rockford were transformed in a matter of minutes.

Rockford's Invisible Tornado Path

Perhaps the strangest thing about the 1928 Rockford tornado today is how ordinary its path looks. Harrison Avenue, Kishwaukee Street, 7th Street, 18th Avenue, Broadway, Woodruff Avenue, Charles Street, State Street and Guilford Road aren't remote historical locations. They are streets thousands of Rockford residents still travel all the time.

Drive through southeast Rockford today and there is little to announce that, on a Friday afternoon in September 1928, a tornado crossed those same streets, demolished factories and houses, carried pieces of buildings through the air and killed people who had been going about an otherwise ordinary workday.

That's one of the peculiar things about local history. Eventually the wreckage gets cleared, buildings are repaired or replaced, factories disappear, streets change, and new houses and businesses arrive. The people who remember what happened grow old and disappear too. The city keeps moving, but underneath the Rockford we see every day is another Rockford composed entirely of things that happened in the same places before we got here.

On September 14, 1928, for about 45 minutes, one of those places was directly in the path of a tornado.

Is This Really the Oldest House in Rockford?

 

Is This Really the Oldest House in Rockford?

There is an old stone house at 2127 Broadway that looks as if Rockford grew around it and forgot to explain itself.

Known as the Herrick-Logli Cobblestone House, it was built in 1847 by Elijah L. Herrick. It has frequently been described as the oldest surviving house in Rockford. That claim has been repeated so often that it has nearly hardened into fact—much like the house itself—but the City of Rockford now uses the more cautious description “one of the oldest surviving buildings in Rockford.”

That leaves us with a small but irresistible local mystery.

Is it actually the oldest house in Rockford?

Before trying to settle that question, the house deserves attention on its own merits. It is one of only a few surviving cobblestone houses in Illinois and an unusually intact example of a building tradition brought west from New York State. Cobblestone construction became particularly associated with communities near the Erie Canal, where thousands of rounded stones excavated during construction were readily available and skilled masons developed elaborate ways of arranging them.

Elijah Herrick came to Rockford from Massachusetts during the mid-1830s. It has been suggested that he passed through New York and learned about cobblestone construction there. Very little else is known about him, and it is not certain that he personally worked as a mason. The house he left behind, however, strongly suggests that somebody involved knew exactly what he was doing.

The exterior was constructed with carefully selected cobbles reportedly taken from the nearby Rock River. Behind that decorative surface is a heavier supporting wall of larger stones. Together, the walls are approximately fifteen inches thick.

The corners are reinforced and decorated with large blocks of Platteville limestone called quoins. The foundation is made from Galena dolomite. The house also retains the balanced proportions, low roof and orderly arrangement associated with Greek Revival architecture. A Victorian porch was added later, giving the front of the building a visible layer from another period.

In other words, this was never just a pile of river rocks arranged into the general shape of a house. It was a carefully designed structure made from several varieties of regional stone, combining practical frontier construction with a recognizable architectural style.

The Herrick house became Rockford’s generally accepted “oldest house” after another early residence disappeared. The Daniel Shaw Haight House, built in 1842, was demolished in 1967. Haight had established the settlement on the east side of the Rock River that eventually joined the west-side settlement associated with Germanicus Kent and Thatcher Blake. Losing his house apparently elevated the Herrick house into first place among the survivors.

But “oldest surviving house” is a surprisingly difficult title to award.

Dates attached to nineteenth-century buildings are not always exact. A property may have begun as a small cabin and later been rebuilt around. Tax records may identify when land changed hands rather than when a structure was completed. Oral histories can conflict with deeds, maps and architectural evidence. Buildings also move, expand and disguise their original forms under later additions.

That may explain why some historical accounts call the Herrick house Rockford’s oldest while official preservation material now stops at “one of the oldest.”

The uncertainty does not diminish the building. If anything, it makes the house more interesting. A definitive claim ends the discussion. A disputed claim gives Rockford something to investigate.

Which surviving house challenges it? Is there another structure containing an older cabin beneath a newer exterior? Does the disagreement concern the construction date, the definition of a house or the boundaries of Rockford when the building was erected? Somewhere in property records, early maps, tax rolls or an overlooked newspaper item may be the answer.

The Herrick-Logli Cobblestone House was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. It is also a designated Rockford landmark. Those protections recognize something more important than a numerical ranking: the building is a rare physical connection to Rockford before factories, furniture companies and expanding neighborhoods transformed the city.

Thousands of people travel Broadway without realizing that the river stones beside them have been holding up the same walls since 1847.

Whether the Herrick house is first, second or merely somewhere near the beginning, it has survived long enough to make the distinction almost beside the point.

Almost.