The story of the Dolly Vardens, a 19th-century baseball team made up of Black women

In May 1883, in the Lamokin Woods in Chester, a group of Black women strode down a hill.

Leading them was Ella Harris, who wore a fashionable pink calico dress and a white jockey cap. She hoisted a baseball bat over one shoulder. The red ribbon pinned to her dress distinguished her as the captain of the Philadelphia Dolly Vardens, a baseball team fully composed of Black women.

Her team wasn’t alone in the woods; a large crowd of people of all ages and races had gathered, awaiting the game that had been announced the day before.

“The thought of seeing a match between girls offered an opportunity worth taking, and long before the time specified the crowd began to gather,” the Delaware County Times reported. “... Suddenly the cry of ‘Here they come!’ issued from the lips of an excited youth, which was taken up by the multitude and a rush was made for the clearing ...”

Most of Harris’ teammates also were wearing colorful dresses and carrying bats as they marched toward a hollow in the woods, where they were meant to play that day. But Harris was frustrated, because the Philadelphia Dolly Vardens No. 2, their intended opponents, were late. They had missed their train.

This was the scene set by an unnamed reporter in the Philadelphia Times, a daily newspaper that circulated from 1875 to 1902, and one of a few newspapers from the area that documented this particular meeting between two baseball teams of Black women. The Dolly Vardens were novelty baseball teams created by John Lang, a white barber by trade, who hoped to capitalize on the trend of novelty exhibition baseball teams that were taking the country by storm in the late 1800s.

While they waited, the Dolly Vardens first played jump-rope, and then practiced pitching to one another, but the opposing team didn’t arrive until a late hour. The Delaware County Times called the game “a failure.” But it was not the only time the Dolly Vardens took the field in the 19th century as one of the earliest female baseball teams in history.

The name “Dolly Varden” comes from a Charles Dickens character in his 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge. Dolly Varden’s outfits in the book inspired a boom of eponymous Dolly Varden fashion in Britain and the U.S. in the 1870s. Dolly Varden looks typically included brightly colored dresses with floral patterns and flat straw hats with fancy trims.

This was Reconstruction-era United States and almost 80 years before Black women got the protected right to vote in the U.S. (While women were nominally afforded the right with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, many Black men and women across the country remained disenfranchised until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.)

The two semiprofessional Dolly Vardens teams also played against a third team of Black women, called “Captain Jinks,” although not much information survives about the latter.

Apart from a handful of syndicated articles, the three teams did not receive detailed news coverage. Articles about their teams were filled with racist language, and often more attention was paid to the women’s clothing than to the outcomes of the game. No box scores are available in surviving newspapers.

One surviving article presents a very dramatized account of a game one of the Dolly Vardens squads played against Captain Jinks, which was declared a draw after 15 innings. The article includes a long description about the coin toss ahead of the game, and another lengthy discussion about a player getting a thorn stuck in her foot after chasing a foul ball into the woods, but not a ton of attention was paid to the quality of play.

But some of the players’ names do survive. Alongside Harris, who played shortstop, there also was Cora Patten, whom some sources have as a pitcher, and others have her as an umpire; Ella Thompson, catcher; Mollie Johnson, first base; Sallie Jonstone, second base; Lizzie Waters, third base; Rhoda Scholl, left field; Ella Johnson, center field; and Agnes Hollingsworth, right field.

Black baseball players have been part of the fabric of Philadelphia as long as the game itself.

The Excelsior Club is considered the first all-Black baseball team in Philadelphia history. On Oct. 3, 1867, four years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the Excelsiors played in what was deemed the first “Colored Championship” against the Brooklyn Uniques at the Satellite Grounds in New York.

The Brooklyn Daily Times reported that it was the first time two Black teams had played each other “on an enclosed ground.” (The first known game between two Black teams was played on Nov. 15, 1859, between the Henson Base Ball Club from Queens and the Unknowns from Brooklyn.) The spectators were of all races, but everyone on the field, from the players to the umpire, was Black. The game was called after seven innings, when it became too dark for the players to see. The Excelsiors won, 42-37.

The extremely high-scoring games were a product of the different rules governing this era of baseball, Negro Leagues historian and author Phil S. Dixon said. For example, the ground-rule double was established in the American League in 1929. Before this rule, such hits would be counted as home runs.

The Philadelphia Pythians were formed in 1866 as a contemporary of the Excelsiors by prominent Black civil rights leaders Octavius Catto and Jacob C. White Jr. The Pythians sought to be on equal footing with white clubs, but their applications to baseball associations on the state and national level repeatedly were rejected because of the race of their players.

“[The Pythians] had the first recorded color barrier being put against them,” said Dixon, who also cofounded the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo. “You can actually see the first barrier that stopped Black people from participating in professional leagues with the white players, because they went to the meeting, and they wrote about it, and those papers have been preserved.”

The Pythians made history on Sept. 3, 1869, by playing against an all-white team, the Olympics. The game was played at 25th and Jefferson, and the Olympics won, 44-23. The Inquirer printed a full play-by-play of the game in the next day’s paper. Catto hit second in the order and played second base.

Catto’s work as manager and captain of the Pythians was a microcosm of the civil rights work he was doing off the field. Catto was killed on his way to vote on Election Day on Oct. 10, 1871 — one year after the 15th Amendment, a cause he had championed, was ratified. Frank Kelly, the man who shot Catto, was acquitted in a trial six years later.

Catto’s team dissolved after his death, but the Pythians were revived as a team in the National Colored Base Ball League in 1887, an organization of all-Black teams that was a precursor to the Negro National League established by Rube Foster in 1920.

While the Pythians were established by Black activists and served as a vehicle for racial justice, the Dolly Vardens were not initially conceived by Lang for such a task.

Novelty baseball teams had proved popular in Philadelphia. The Snorkey Club was made up of players who were missing arms or hands. The Snorkeys annually faced the Hoppers, who all were one-legged. (Yes, this is real.)

The Snorkey Club’s left fielder lost his right hand and wrist in the Battle of Gettysburg, and several others had been injured in railway or mill accidents. The Reading Railway gave its employees the day off to watch the contest between the teams.

“Perhaps you think that we can’t play ball? But we can,” John Gorman, the captain of the Snorkeys, who lost his right arm in a railway accident, told the Philadelphia Times in 1883. “If the Athletic don’t do better than they have recently, we’ll challenge them to play the two cripple nines in dead earnest.”

(The Philadelphia Athletics were a professional team that played in the American Association, a 19th-century professional baseball league.)

So the Dolly Vardens were intended to be a spectacle, which explains the lack of box scores and lack of media attention to the games themselves. They weren’t Lang’s first venture, either — he had previously fielded an all-Chinese baseball team in Philadelphia.

The teams ultimately seemed to be a short-lived experiment, with no mention of any games beyond 1883. Male teams bearing the same name cropped up later, however, and these occasionally are confused with the Black Dolly Vardens.

The Dolly Vardens were the antecedent for later accomplishments of Black women in baseball. In the 1950s, three Black women crossed gender barriers to play alongside, and against, men in the Negro Leagues.

After Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947, top talent from the Negro Leagues began following in his footsteps to sign with MLB teams. As a result, ticket sales for the Negro Leagues started to decline, and the manager of the Indianapolis Clowns — for whom Hank Aaron briefly played in 1952 — tried to find innovative ways to get people back to the ballpark.

That led him to signing the Negro Leagues’ first woman, second baseman Toni Stone, in 1953. Stone took over the position Aaron had played before he joined the Milwaukee Braves. Stone had played on men’s semipro teams but became the first woman to play regularly on an American major-level professional baseball team once she joined the Clowns.

Stone had been playing semipro baseball since she was 16. But in a parallel to the Dolly Vardens, her opportunity with the Clowns came with the catch that she mainly was signed as a novelty.

“Toni Stone, certainly, she played a lot of baseball with men, right, but she felt like she was never really fully given her chance,” said Dixon, who knew Stone personally before she died in 1996. “And then when the ladies’ professional baseball league came along, she’s right along with them. First of all, they wouldn’t let her play, and she said, ‘Well I didn’t want to wear a dress, no way.’ ”

Skirts were required of the women who then played for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

“Young ladies need to know about these people because what you’re seeing is people who took the talent that they had — we all have some kind of talent — and they took it all the way; nothing could stop them, not even the culture,” Dixon said.

Mamie Johnson, a two-way player, also was signed by the Clowns in 1953 after being rejected by the AAGPBL because of her race. Satchel Paige helped her develop her curveball, and she posted a 33-8 record with the team.

The third and final woman to play in the Negro Leagues was Philadelphia native Connie Morgan, who became the Clowns’ starting second baseman in 1954.

Before joining the Clowns, Morgan played for the North Philadelphia Honey Drippers, reportedly an all-female, all-Black baseball team — just like the Dolly Vardens had been, 71 years earlier. However, no coverage of Honey Drippers’ games, nor the names of the other members of the team, survived in prominent local newspapers.

Morgan spent five seasons with the Honey Drippers as a utility player and amassed a .338 batting average. At the time she signed with the Clowns, Morgan also was in business school and played basketball in the offseason.

“Miss Connie Morgan, Indianapolis Clowns’ rookie $10,000 female second baseman, electrified over 6,000 fans in the Negro American League’s opening twin-bill at Rickwood Field, Birmingham on May 16, when she went far to her right to make a sensational stop of a scorcher labelled ‘base-hit’, flipped to shortstop Bill Holder, and started a lightning double play against the Birmingham Black Barons,” The Pittsburgh Courier wrote in 1954.

In Morgan’s first appearance with the Clowns in her hometown of Philadelphia, she took on the Kansas City Monarchs in front of several of her old friends from business school. The Clowns swept the doubleheader at Connie Mack Stadium.

Morgan took that field in Philadelphia 71 years after the Dolly Vardens walked through the Lamokin Woods. Whether she had ever heard of those women who had come before her in her sport, we’ll never know. But Ella Harris and Connie Morgan are part of a history that should not be forgotten.

“It shows that Black people have been in this game just as long as anyone else,” Dixon said. “That’s important. We didn’t come later. We’re right there all the time.”