The Saints on Sunday: Ballparks and Sabbatarianism in St. Paul

In the industrializing United States of a century ago, play and recreation became commodities—even on Sunday. This development challenged a Christian America that held the entire Sabbath sacred. Mass-market toys, like popular Noah’s ark sets whose content and message promoted scriptural reflection and Christian contemplation, were considered appropriate forms of Sunday recreation for children. In other words, child’s play could be acceptable on Sunday. For adults, however, the situation was more complex. Organized games, such as baseball, were less amenable to Christian messages than biblical toys. Paying to observe professionals play the game was even less likely to promote these beliefs. Therefore, Sunday baseball became a source of social tension, particularly in urban America. Since Catholic and other liturgical immigrants accustomed to the relaxed European Sabbath challenged the evangelical Protestant native stock for control of urban life, this religious dispute was overlaid with tensions of class, ethnicity, and politics.

This story is about a series of such conflicts in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Sunday baseball debates not only reflected the tensions noted above—matters already discussed in the urban and sports history literature—but also had an important impact on the location and design of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century ballparks. The Sunday baseball fight helped push the St. Paul Saints to build, renovate, and equip four principal ballparks in fifteen years. While Sabbatarians voiced objections about baseball and ball grounds in St. Paul, the reasons behind these concerns were more nuanced and complex than the arguments might indicate. That is, a popular issue of the day was successfully manipulated to serve other, nonreligious purposes.

“The Sabbath was made for Man, and not for the Baseball Game!”

Speaking these words from his pulpit in May 1895, the Reverend J. C. Hull of St. Paul’s Clinton Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church added his voice to the chorus that publicly objected to Sunday baseball games in St. Paul that spring.¹ The controversy in which Hull participated was only one of many that flared up in the city, repeating a scene played out across the country as Sabbatarians made their stand against the desecration of the Lord’s Day.

The American Sabbatarian tradition—which prohibited Sunday work, disruption of the peace, and various unseemly activities like sports, gambling, and entertainment—dates back to the country’s colonial origins. These prohibitions remained strongest in the East, where they had been written into seventeenth-century legal codes and enforced for two centuries. However, maintaining control over belief and behavior became increasingly difficult in the face of the explicit challenges of the nineteenth century, among them westward expansion, industrialization, urbanization, and ethnoreligious diversity.² Sunday entertainments presented the greatest and eventually most successful threats to Sabbatarian restrictions, and the growing popularity of baseball made it among the most significant of these amusements.

In Minnesota, laws against Sabbath-breaking were included in territorial statutes, carried over into statehood in 1858, and revised through the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, certain things necessary for the “good order, health, or comfort of the community” were allowed. Various amendments to these laws suggest that definitions of what constituted “good order” were contested. For instance, it was legal to operate an ice factory or to use shoe horses to transport the U.S. mail. Baseball, however, was clearly prohibited. Between the drafting of the original laws in the 1840s and 1909, when Sunday baseball became legal in the state, the city of St. Paul experienced the rise of those social and economic forces that hastened the decline of strict Sunday observance.³

The 1895 Controversy Over Sunday Baseball

When Charles Comiskey moved with his Sioux City Western League team to St. Paul in mid-March 1895, he had relatively little time to make arrangements for his club’s debut. He soon located a site for his grounds and began work on the grandstand and field. The block he leased was in a mixed commercial and residential area about a mile northwest of the central business district. It had been used previously for amateur...