For 74 years, John W. Jackson (a.k.a Bud Fowler March 16, 1858 - Feb. 26, 1913) lay in an unmarked grave only 30 miles from Cooperstown, underappreciated and in anonymity.
When Fowler passed away at the age of 54, his sister could not afford a gravesite, so her brother was buried in a potter’s field in Frankfort’s Oak View Cemetery without a headstone to mark the spot.
Many years of meticulous sleuthing would eventually lead to a long overdue headstone that reads in part “Black Baseball Pioneer.”
Fowler was born John W. Jackson in Fort Plain, New York. His father had escaped from slavery and migrated to New York. In 1859, his family moved from Fort Plain, New York, to Cooperstown. He learned to play baseball during his youth in Cooperstown. Biographer L. Robert Davids writes that he was nicknamed "Bud" because he called the other players by that name.
Fowler first played for an all-white professional team based out of New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1872, when he was 14 years old. He is documented as playing for another professional team on July 21, 1877, when he was 19. On April 24, 1878, he pitched a game for the Picked Nine, who defeated the Boston Red Caps, champions of the National League in 1877. He pitched some more for the Chelsea team, then finished that season with the Worcester club.
Largely supporting himself as a barber, Fowler continued to play for baseball teams in New England and Canada for the next four years. He then moved to the Midwest. In 1883, Fowler played for a team in Niles, Ohio; in 1884, he played for Stillwater, Minnesota, in the Northwestern League.
In Keokuk, Iowa, there had not been a professional baseball team since 1875. However, in 1885, local businessman R. W. "Nick" Curtis was the chief force behind starting a new team(the Keokuk Hawkeyes) and hired Fowler for it.
Fowler became the most popular player on the Keokuk team. The local newspaper, the Keokuk Gate City and Constitution, described him as "a good ball player, a hard worker, a genius on the ball field, intelligent, gentlemanly in his conduct and deserving of the good opinion entertained for him by base ball admirers here."
During a nearly two-decade long career on the diamond, Fowler starred at second base and on the mound for both Black and integrated teams despite often facing severe backlash and banishment from teammates and opponents due to his race. Fowler also seemed to be the favorite with the spectators and was greeted with applause every time he stepped to the plate.
Fowler moved to play with a team in Pueblo, Colorado. In 1886, he played for a team in Topeka, Kansas. That team won the pennant behind Fowler's .309 average. He also led the league in triples. In 1887, Fowler moved to Binghamton, New York and played on a team there. Racial tensions arose, and his teammates refused to continue playing with him. In 1888, he played for the Crawfordsville Hoosiers/Terre Haute Hoosiers. Fowler played for the 1890 Sterling Blue Coats / Galesburg Pavers / Burlington Hawkeyes, as the Illinois-Iowa League franchise relocated twice. In 1892, Fowler played for Kearney, Nebraska in the Nebraska State League. In 1893 and 1894 he played on the integrated ballclub called the Findlay Sluggers.
In the summer of 1894 Fowler and Home Run Johnson, along with three white businessmen, Len Hoch, Howard and Rolla Taylor, formed the Page Fence Giants in Adrian, Michigan. Fowler played second base for the 1895 Giants but was moved to right field when the team signed Sol White to play that position in June 1895. Fowler apparently had a falling out with the management team and by June 1895, both Fowler and Johnson were simply referred to as salaried players and not members of the ownership group. Fowler played about another month with the Page Fence club and then finished the season with one game with the Michigan State League member Adrian Demons and about 30 games with another MSL team, the Lansing Senators squad. From 1894 to 1904, Fowler played and/or managed the Page Fence Giants, Cuban Giants, Smoky City Giants, All-American Black Tourists, and Kansas City Stars.
According to baseball historian James A. Riley, Fowler played 10 seasons of organized baseball, "a record [for an African American player] until broken by Jackie Robinson in his last season with the Brooklyn Dodgers."
Fowler was elected to the Hall of Fame in December 2021 by the Early Baseball Era Committee. But unlike most of his fellow Hall of Famer brethren, Fowler had been all but forgotten because of the times in which he shined on the diamond.
The Dubuque (Iowa) Times said of Fowler in 1890, “If he had only been painted white, he would be playing with the best of them.”
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