As you may have heard, the state of Virginia is placing a marker commemorating Pete Hill on the grounds of the Cedar Grove Baptist Church in Buena, Culpeper County, Virginia. It joins a batch of new markers at various sites related to African American history, women’s suffrage, and the War of 1812—the most notable, perhaps, being a marker for Henrietta Lacks.
I worked with some folks at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources to develop the text of the marker. Here’s the final version:
PETE HILL (1882-1951)
John Preston “Pete” Hill, Negro League baseball player and manager, was born nearby, on 12 Oct., probably 1882, and likely to formerly enslaved parents. Banned from whites-only major leagues, Hill became a star outfielder for African American teams, notably the Philadelphia Giants and Chicago American Giants. A Cuban League 1910/11 winter-season batting champion (with a .365 average), Hill hit 28 home runs for the Detroit Stars in 1919 (when Babe Ruth hit 29 in more games), marking Hill as among black baseball’s earliest power hitters. Hill died on 19 Dec. 1951 and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.
I wrote a first draft, then we edited and compressed it down to 101 words so it would fit on the sign. It’s not perfect, but it does the job, I think.
I thought I would go ahead and provide an annotated version of the marker text, so you can see the sources and the reasoning behind some of the choices we made.
John Preston “Pete” Hill, Negro League baseball player and manager, was born nearby, on 12 Oct., probably 1882, and likely to formerly enslaved parents.
A vast constellation of documents confirms John Preston Hill’s identity as the ballplayer Pete Hill, and Hill’s place and date of birth. Most important are his World War I draft card (which gives October 12, 1882, but no place of birth), his death certificate (October 12, 1882, Virginia), the 1900 U.S. census (October 1882, Virginia), the 1920 U.S. census (ca. 1884, Virginia), and his Form SS-5, Hill’s application for a Social Security number (October 12, 1884, Rapidan, Virginia). (Another Social Security document lists his birth date as October 12, 1883.) A 1916 passenger list gives his birthplace as “Buena Vista, Va.,” which might be a mistaken reference to Buena, a small community just north of Rapidan in Culpeper County. Hill’s family in Pittsburgh was pretty well-known, and coverage in the Pittsburgh Courier, along with census records, confirmed their origins in Culpeper County and neighboring Orange County.
We don’t have specific documentation of his parents’ slave status before the end of the Civil War, but they were both apparently born in Virginia in the 1850s, so it seems highly likely that they were enslaved.
Banned from whites-only major leagues, Hill became a star outfielder for African American teams, notably the Philadelphia Giants and Chicago American Giants. A Cuban League 1910/11 winter-season batting champion (with a .365 average), Hill hit 28 home runs for the Detroit Stars in 1919 (when Babe Ruth hit 29 in more games), marking him as among black baseball’s earliest power hitters.
My own compilation of Cuban League box scores from the 1910/11 season (unpublished as of yet, but hopefully soon to be posted at Baseball-Reference.com) indicates a .391 average for Hill (36 for 92), but .365 (35 for 96) is the official figure cited in Jorge S. Figueredo, Cuban Baseball: A Statistical History, 1878-1961). The Cuban League at that time was notorious for “adjusting” statistics after the season, particularly those pertaining to the prestigious batting title, so I tend to think that the statistics I compile straight from the box scores are more reliable than official numbers. Nevertheless I decided that an historical marker required official sourcing whenever possible.
Early drafts included the oft-cited factoid that in 1911 Hill hit safely in 115 of 116 games, but I could find only secondary sources for that, and decided to go with his remarkable home run total in 1919 instead. It’s a new piece of information, one that doesn’t appear in any of the standard reference books, statistical compilations, or Negro league histories. As such it stands in for the new wave of Negro league research, one that obviously works a lot better for a general audience than trying to explain in a pithy phrase or two that he walked a lot or had a high on-base percentage or played a bunch of his career in an offense-killing home park, which are the other major results of recent research. For whatever reason, until very recently nobody had done extensive research on the Detroit Stars’ 1919 season (or at least nobody had published it), so Hill’s home run production that year had been entirely forgotten.
It was, however, known at the time. Hill’s home run count was continually publicized by the Detroit Stars as the 1919 season progressed. Hill himself touted it in a press release printed in the Chicago Defender (January 10, 1920):
(For the whole story of Hill’s 1919 season, see my article, “1919: A Tale of Two Sluggers,” in the Outsider Baseball Bulletin, June 8, 2010, as well as the two-part series, “The Year Before the Negro National League,” also in the OBB, September 1 & September 8, 2010.)
By the way, this is the original sentence I wrote: “His total of 28 home runs for the Detroit Stars in 1919 marked the end of the deadball era in black baseball.” But the people at the Department of Historic Resources thought that the reference to the “deadball era” would confuse those who weren’t baseball history buffs. In explaining what I meant, I mentioned Babe Ruth’s 29 home runs the same year, and we ended up deciding that Ruth’s was a name everyone recognized, and that comparing Hill’s season to his would help the uninitiated grasp the significance of Hill’s accomplishments.
I did have some reservations about the comparison: Pete Hill was really nothing like Babe Ruth, in kind or degree, and of course I dislike the old habit of talking about Negro leaguers as the black version of some white star or other. But, just as Spottswood Poles was called the “black Ty Cobb” by his manager Ed Bolden, it was Pete Hill who compared himself to Ruth. As the comparison was made in contemporary sources and by the subject himself, it seemed legitimate.
Hill died on 19 Dec. 1951 and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.
His death date has been confirmed by his death certificate and by a Fay Young column in the Chicago Defender (December 29, 1951), in which Young notes the death of “Pete Hill, the grand old man of baseball,” on “Wednesday of last week [December 19] in Buffalo, N. Y., where in recent years he had made his home.” So far this is the only contemporary newspaper mention of Hill’s death I’ve been able to find.
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