They were barbers, porters — even doctors.
But however they plied their trades professionally, the dozens of men who comprised the roster of the Fredericksburg Frogs shared the same passion and pastime: baseball.
The history of baseball in Fredericksburg is both lengthy and well-chronicled, dating back to co-ed interest meetings held during Reconstruction. Early games were played on the grounds of the former Kenmore Plantation, and in 1908 the city fielded its first professional team, the Fredericksburg White Sox.
By comparison, much less is known about the Fredericksburg Frogs, an all-Black, all-local team that starred on area diamonds — including the former Gouldman Park — from 1919 through the early 1930s.
On Thursday, the Fredericksburg Nationals unveiled a new alternate uniform and identity to honor the Frogs, which were described in contemporary news reports as “the world’s hoppinest team.” For five home games this season, the FredNats will transform into the Frogs, whose amphibian-inspired aesthetic was the product of extensive research as well as some educated guesses to fill gaps in the historical record.
“We searched high and low as part of our research to find the logo lettering of the products,” Fredericksburg Nationals co-owner Seth Silber said. “And while we learned a lot about the team, we never could find anything. So we envisioned what we thought it might look like.”
Branding for many prominent Black and Negro League teams, such as the Kansas City Monarchs, Silber noted, feature prominent allusions to royalty. Accordingly, the frog on the new logo is wearing a crown and wielding a scepter. The uniforms themselves included neat pinstripes and yellow lettering with “Fredericksburg” across the chest.
The work leading up to Thursday’s unveiling began more than five years ago, when the team partnered with the Fredericksburg Area Museum and Germanna Community College to share the region’s baseball history.
“We really scoured newspapers, oral histories, maps — anything we could find that had to do with the history of baseball,” said Kerri Barile Tambs, a historian at Dovetail/Mead & Hunt.
Their work combined original sources and the use of technology such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to overlay historical maps to see where long-gone ballfields once stood.
“More importantly, our research discovered 68 names of people who were actually on these [Frogs] teams,” Barile Tambs said. “They were people. They were members of our community.”
Former Fredericksburg Mayor Mary Katherine Greenlaw was born in 1939, well after the Frogs disbanded. However, she shared an anecdote from a friend who had memories of watching the city’s Black teams play at Gouldman Park.
“It was his big treat that his father or his grandfather would take him to the games,” Greenlaw related. “And his comment to me was: ‘They knew how to play hard, and they knew how to laugh hard.’”
Thursday’s forum yielded additional hardball histories. Spotsylvania native James Dyson shared how options were limited for him and other Black youths, regardless of their talent. There was a Black team in Caroline, but, to the north, the Stafford Braves were all white.
“And so we had nowhere to go to play baseball if you wanted to play other than the high school,” Dyson said. “And so we formed a community for baseball.”
That community took shape on Sunday afternoons, as kids like Dyson poured out of the pews to play pickup games.
“It was a big deal,” he said. “It was a big outing because there were no other activities going on except church.”
Much like the 2024 Carolina League champion FredNats, the Frogs were also apparently a tough out. As part of their research into the team, Dovetail discovered that they advanced to the Mid-Atlantic League championship in 1922, where they faced a team from Alexandria.
“We couldn’t figure out if they won,” Barile Tambs said. “We’ll get there.”
Seth Silber is the co-chair of the Fredericksburg Free Press board. Board members do not influence newsroom operations.
