Stew Thornley has been involved with baseball since his childhood growing up in the shadow of the University of Minnesota’s Minneapolis campus, where his mother taught library sciences.
While playing at Marshall High, Thornely was the bat boy for some of Dick Siebert’s Big Ten-winning Gophers baseball teams. He has written more than 20 books on baseball, mostly about the game’s presence in Minnesota, and since 2007 has been an official scorer for Twins games.
Closest to his heart, however, are the places the game is played.
“I love ballparks,” said Thornley, who lives in Roseville.
That’s why Thornley and his colleagues in the Halsey Hall chapter of SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) have worked to get plaques up at the sites of long-gone local diamonds: one at the site where the original St. Paul Saints played on Lexington Parkway, another on Nicollet in Minneapolis where the minor-league Millers once played.
The next one, Thornley hopes, will be where he works as a communications specialist for the State Department of Health, or at least near it. That building is on part of the land of what was known officially as Down Town Ballpark, also known as “the Pillbox” for its once-small footprint on the northern edge of downtown St. Paul.
The area is now home to the state Agricultural and Health Laboratory and a parking garage. The Pillbox was a square stadium with no seating in the outfield, built quickly in 1903 at the corner of 12th and Robert streets and below a part of Summit Avenue that no longer exists.
“It was just a grandstand but it must have been nice. You could see the Capitol being built, and behind the centerfield corner was Central Park,” Thornley said. “The Mechanic Arts school was right across Roberts Street.”
‘A cozy little ballpark’
Thornley estimates there have been about eight professional ballparks in St. Paul, the most recent being CHS Field, home to the Twins Class AAA team, in Lowertown. The Down Town Ballpark was unique.
“It was a cozy little ballpark,” Thornley said, “and like many were, it was made quickly of wood and aluminum. They didn’t last long. If they didn’t burn down, they would rust.”
In use from 1903-10, the stadium was called the “Pillbox” because it was so small, just 201 feet from home plate to the right field wall, and about 280 down the left field line,” according to researcher Jim Hinman. Home runs weren’t awarded for hitting a ball over the fence; batters instead had to reach a pole positioned beyond it. Balls hit over the right field fence were generally ruled ground-rule doubles
The Saints, eager to play some games closer to downtown than Lexington Park farther north, played there. But maybe most of its history comes from Black baseball. The St. Paul Gophers and a team called the Minneapolis Keystone Tigers played there, and in 1909 the park was host to the unofficial Black baseball championship of the West when the Gophers beat hall of famer Rube Foster and the Leland Giants club out of Chicago.
That history, and public opinion, will be the primary factors in whether the Pillbox gets its own commemorative spot on the Capitol grounds, said Tina Chimuzu, planner-fellow for the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board (CAAPB), which is responsible for all zoning within the Capitol’s St. Paul campus.
During winters, an ice sheet was created at the “Pillbox,” a St. Paul baseball park, seen in this undated photo. The St. Paul baseball park was on the edge of downtown, near the state Capitol, at 12th and Robert Streets. (Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society)
After a statue of Columbus was torn down by protestors in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board — responsible for all zoning within the Capitol’s St. Paul campus — changed its application process, said Erik Cedarleaf Dahl, CAAPB’s executive secretary.
The focus isn’t on the form a commemoration might take but “the story and the connection to Minnesotans and the history of Minnesota, and how it helps tell the story of Minnesota’s diversity and history,” he said.
If approved, the Halsey Hall SABR chapter will be responsible for raising the money to create and maintain a CAAPB design that might include a statewide competition. Ultimately, Dahl said. it will become state property, “And we maintain it in perpetuity.”
A swing in Stillwater
In Washington County, Brent Peterson is trying to get a plaque on the site of a baseball field still in use to commemorate the diamond on which Bud Fowler played as a member of the 1884 Stillwater Loggers. The “old athletic field” at Orleans and Sixth Avenue is owned by the school district.
“They have been somewhat open to the idea of something there, but they had questions about maintenance and liability,” said Peterson, executive director of the Washington County Historical Society. “So, it’s kind of in limbo.”
One of the first Black professional baseball players, Fowler was enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2022. Raised in Cooperstown, N.Y., Fowler started his career playing in the eastern United States and Canada.
“In 1884, he stopped in what was known as the Northwestern League and played on the Stillwater team,” Peterson said. “That was really the first place that got people talking about him across the country, because of the local newspaper coverage.”
The team folded that season, but Fowler played more than 50 games for the Loggers before moving on. Later, he tried to start an all-Black league but couldn’t raise enough capital and died in 1913 of consumption before the first Negro League was started — by Foster — in 1920.
Peterson said he plans to resume his conversation with the school district this spring.
“Seventy years later, Bud Grant played for the Loggers,” he said of the longtime Minnesota Vikings coach. “That’s two hall of farmers, in different sports, of course, who played there. I’m open to something that celebrates both Buds.”
How to comment
The CAAPB is accepting comments from the public until 4:30 p.m. May 5 on whether all of the conditions in Minnesota Rules 2400.2703 Subpart 2 have been met for the board to consider the Pillbox application. Comments can be sent to CAAPB planner Tina Chimuzu via email at Tina.Chimuzu@state.mn.us or through the post at Freeman Building, 625 Robert St. N., St. Paul, MN 5515.
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