Ashby Columbus Dunbar

I’ve been wanting to post details from my ongoing research more regularly—to make the blog a little bloggier, you might say. So here’s a little research find from last year.

Ashby Columbus Dunbar, who clearly belongs in a Dave Frishberg song, was an outfielder for many black professional teams for more than fifteen years. Here’s one of the very few pictures of him that I’ve found, showing him with the Schenectady Mohawk Giants in 1913:

I know nothing about his baseball career prior to his late 20s. He first emerges as an infielder/outfielder with George Williams’s Wilmington Giants in 1906, then moved to the Chester Stars as a shortstop in 1907, before being picked up by Sol White of the Philadelphia Giants in 1908 to replace Pete Hill. Within a few weeks Dunbar jumped to the Brooklyn Royal Giants, setting the pattern for the next decade, as he changed teams as often as anyone in black baseball.

He played for teams from Louisville to New York, from Schenectady to Florida, before landing with the Penn Station Red Caps in 1917 for the swansong of his career. In 156 games at the top level of black professional ball he hit .289/.359/.371, which in those deadball days was good for an OPS+ of 118. Perhaps the highlight of Dunbar’s career was the winter season he spent in Cuba in 1908/09, where he was one of the best hitters in the league, slashing .288/.404/.373 for Fe (OPS+ of 187). He also tripled in the Brooklyn Royal Giants’ 9-1 victory over the Cincinnati Reds in the pre-season American Series.

Other than his performances as measured in box scores and recounted tersely in game accounts, I’ve found nothing about his personality, no anecdotes or quotes or vivid moments from games. Documentation of his life is sparse: he appears in the 1880 census as an infant in Charlottesville, Virginia, living with his parents Christopher and Ella (or Ellen) Dunbar, then in the 1900 census as a 20-year-old day laborer living in Washington, D.C. He registered for the World War I draft after settling in New York to work as a porter at Penn Station and play for the Red Caps baseball team. Here is his draft card:

Up until recently I had no clue what became of him after his last (1920) appearances in box scores. By that time he had married a much younger woman named Florence—in the 1920 census they had no children—but there wasn’t any trace of what had happened to him after that or when or where he had died.

Last fall, however, I finally located him in a New York City death index I had been using for years. His name, it turned out, had been mistakenly listed on his death certificate as “Ashley Dunbar.” This is the sort of error I’m usually on the alert for—how I had managed to miss him for so long I’ll never know.

Anyway, Ashby Dunbar passed away at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City on May 5, 1925, at the age of 45, from an intestinal obstruction and related problems, and was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Queens. Here is his death certificate, with the reverse side, which actually gets his first name right.

Comments

[JR]

He continued to play for the Pennsylvania Red Caps baseball team for the 1921 and 1922 seasons too. He doesn't seem to have played in 1923 for them.