Who Were the Dolly Vardens of Philadelphia?

While searing the Internet and browsing through social media to find topics to highlight during African-American History Month, I came across a tweet claiming that the Philadelphia Dolly Vardens, a team of all African-American women, became the first professional baseball team in 1867, a full two years before the formation of the Cincinnati Red Stockings.  Intrigued, but also skeptical, I wanted to find out more about the Dolly Vardens.

The first thing I noticed is that the statement that the Dolly Vardens were the first professional baseball team, or the first team to be paid to play baseball, is repeated on numerous websites, tweets, and Instagram posts without any citation or reference to an original source.  One Facebook page, entitled “The Dolly Varden Project,” even posts a photo of an all-female African-American team claiming it to be of the Dolly Vardens.  Further research, however, reveals the photo to be of a team organized by a YMCA in the 1920s.  Nonetheless, this photo continues to circulate on the Web as a photo of the Dolly Vardens.

The second thing I noticed was a complete lack of any contemporary source material on the Internet referring to the Dolly Vardens. I did find a New York Times article dated May 18, 1887, which refers to two teams called the Dolly Vardens who met for a game in Lamokin Woods, located in modern day Chester, Pennsylvania.  One of the teams was from Chester while the other was from Philadelphia.  The article says little about the actual playing, instead concentrates in a demeaning fashion on the women’s style of dress and manner of speaking.  The women are described as wearing calico dresses with colored ribbons and making a loud scene.

Further research revealed the Dolly Varden was a character in a Charles Dickens novel entitled, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty.  Varden is a flirtatious young lady known for wearing flamboyant outfits.  The name Dolly Varden also refers to a style of women’s fashion, popular in Philadelphia high society in the 1860s and 1870s.

We know that African-American baseball teams were known for a more theatrical style of play.  Indeed, hotels were known to hire African-American baseball teams to entertain their guests.  It is a reasonable supposition that a hotel could have hired a team of African-American women to dress in flamboyant fashion, and put on a flirtatious show while playing a baseball game.

But at this point, this conclusion is nothing more than a hypothesis based on the best evidence currently available to me.  Whether the claim that the Dolly Vardens were indeed the first paid baseball team is true is something that I can’t confirm.  When you consider that women of the nineteenth century rarely held paying jobs, or if they did their salaries were considered the property of their fathers or husbands, I remain suspicious.  I further remain suspicious of sloppy research which seems to have proliferated in the age of the Internet, where a number of websites saying the same thing seems to take the place of finding primary sources.  At any rate, the mystery of the Dolly Vardens persists.

By: William J. Kovatch, Jr. 

References

“Miss Harris’s Base-Ball Nine: Dusky Dolly Vardens ofChester Give an Exhibition,” New York Times (May 18, 1887).

Winks, Linton, “Baseball In Skirts, 19th-Century Style,”National Public Radio (July 12, 2015).

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