Drifting in and out of a sleepy, dreamlike state, I’m relaxing in a big, soft chair on my front porch overlooking the Nashwaak River in Marysville, a suburb of Fredericton on the city’s north side. It’s one of those warm August evenings, and I can see the floodlights on the other side of the river and hear the announcer calling the game on the public address system at Royals Field on Baseball Hill.
Baseball Hill has a nice ring to it. Kind of like Boot Hill in Tombstone, Arizona, the graveyard where gunslingers were buried with their boots on in the days of the Wild West. Baseball Hill sounds like the place where lifelong lovers of the game go to spend eternity, as in, “Hey, did you hear about Charlie? He died last week, and his soul’s gone to Baseball Hill.”
Gazing at the powerful lights shining through the big pine trees surrounding Royals Field and hearing the crowd cheering, my imagination drifts back to the summer of 1972.
I’m sitting with my girlfriend in her apartment on the top floor of one of those stately old brownstones on Boylston Street in Boston. It’s a Saturday night, and we can see the lights of Fenway Park through an open window and hear the crowd at the Red Sox game cheering on the hometown team. Fenway Park is on the other side of the Back Bay Fens near the city’s iconic landmark, the Citgo sign. If you’ve seen the movie Field of Dreams, you’ve seen the Citgo sign.
Half a century’s slipped away since those New England summers of my youth; I think as the cheering coming from Baseball Hill brings me back to the present.
Fifty years is a long time, but not for the Royals Field Pines. They’ve been there for a couple of hundred years at least, and, I bet, Alexander “Boss” Gibson, who established the company town of Marysville in 1862 after moving here from Charlotte County, admired them as he strode up Baseball Hill in the late 1800s to watch the employees of his cotton mill and his other enterprises play. For many of them, baseball was their only summer recreation.
Gibson, a brilliant businessman and an expert at managing water-powered mills using the innovative gang saws first used in New Brunswick in the 1840s, knew the value of managing workers wisely to maximize efficiency. His years as a labourer, then as a sawyer and later as a mill manager gave him a well-honed understanding of human nature. He believed baseball would provide his men with fresh air and exercise and foster a healthy competitive spirit among his workers. And it would be good for families.
Perhaps Boss Gibson was in the crowd on that summer day in 1895, when Marysville took on the Saint John Roses in the earliest recorded game ever played at Royals Field. In that game, held 17 years before Fenway Park’s first baseball game in 1912, Marysville beat Saint John setting up a rivalry that would last for years.
In 1911, community-minded volunteers built a fence to prevent cows from a neighbouring pasture from wandering up Baseball Hill and onto Royals Field. This improvement helped end the complaints of many of the ball players about what those cows left behind and made sliding into home plate less worrisome.
After the Second World War, Marysville’s volunteers did more work. They upgraded the playing field using clay from Boss Gibson’s former brickyard and constructed a new fence, a dressing room, a canteen and bleachers big enough to seat almost 2,000 fans. Night games began on Baseball Hill in 1971 with the installation of powerful floodlights.
As I continue to drift in and out of my dreamlike state, the Royals Field lights shining through the branches of those remarkable pine trees bring back more memories of the New England summers of my youth. There we sat, the two of us, beside the open window in the apartment on Boylston Street. It was the weekend, and we could see the lights at Fenway and hear the crowd cheering on the hometown team.
Great story Lane..thanks