Baseball, football and basketball — this is the holy trinity of American sports. Some would want to add soccer (ha!) or hockey (more Canadian, really) or even golf to that list, but like the actual holy trinity any additions or subtractions would quickly incite violence among adherents. If I were to compile a similar list, one featuring the least American of sports, cricket would certainly be at the top. Now, there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with cricket, per se, but it hardly fits the American spirit as we understand it today. A sport featuring outfits, equipment and rules like cricket can only itself be the product of an equally arcane society. America has certainly been called many things, but arcane isn’t often one of them. England on the other hand, with her crumbling medieval castles and posh elderly queen, fits the bill quite nicely.
It’s surprising then that one of the most popular sports played in turn of the century Lake County was cricket. It’s not that people didn’t know of baseball, but sports like that were considered the realm of the working class — hardly the thing for a banker or entrepreneur to partake in. Modeling themselves as they had for decades after the English aristocracy, America’s wealthy elite sought more “appropriate” ways of competing with each other and cricket was the perfect substitute. The ten years on either side of 1900 proved to be a renaissance for the sport in California, of all places. Of the state’s 59 counties, ten created cricket teams between 1890 and 1914. Travelling to each other’s corners of the state, these teams were as much social clubs as they were sports teams. After all, the player on the opposing team one day might be the perfect business contact the next! You can only imagine the level of networking that took place during these travelling matches.
Wanting to partake in the fun, Lake County became home to not one, but two teams: one from Lakeport and the other from Burns Valley. One of the early supporters of Lake County cricket was also the father of Lake County’s wine industry: Charles Mifflin Hammond. Living on a sprawling estate in Upper Lake for 30 years of his life, Hammond traced his roots back to the East Coast, where in the mid-19th century the real American aristocracy still held court. Hammond’s early childhood of cultured leisure and refinement smoothly flowed into a young adulthood of the same. He came from a family of merchants and gentlemen farmers—a term used to describe wealthy men who owned but did not necessarily directly operate farms themselves. When he entered Harvard University in the late 1870s young Hammond took to the sorts of activities men of his standing were expected to: membership in social clubs and participation in matches of cricket. His interest in the sport followed him to California when he moved here in 1884 to study under the famous vintner Captain Gustave Ferdinand Niebaum at his estate in Napa County. Although Charles was enrolled to start school at Harvard Law, he changed his course of study to focus on viticulture.
While living in Napa, Hammond travelled to the then tranquil resort area of Lake County and fell in love with the land. He eventually went on to purchase hundreds of acres in what is now Upper Lake and began his very own vineyards. Together with his wife Harriet Lee Hammond, sister-in-law to none other than Rough Rider and future President Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Mifflin Hammond enjoyed the kind of life only the landed aristocracy can. Perhaps remembering his fondness for the sport at Harvard, Hammond offered his estate up as the club house for the newly-created Lakeport Cricket Club team, which local lawyer and English immigrant Herbert V. Keeling had created in 1889. Two years earlier, the Burns Valley Cricket Club had been founded by another Englishman, Charles Owen and with the creation of the Lakeport club there was now a chance for actual rivalry. Hammond offered his sprawling estate in Upper Lake for the first cricket match between the two.
Throwing a cricket match in Lake County was not simply a matter of clearing space and going at it. Almost more for the entertainment of the wives, children and neighbors of the participants, these matches demanded temporary bleachers be built, the local press come out to cover the event and — in what would soon become commonplace but was then still a novelty — people take pictures with their personal cameras. For the next decade matches continued at the Hammond estate or elsewhere about the area. On occasion the teams would travel to San Francisco, Santa Cruz, or Sacramento to play teams from other counties.
No matter how enjoyable a game is, after 20 years of playing the same group of people, even the most exciting moments can lose their luster. This was the inevitable result for the cricketers in Lake County when, despite assurances to provide hospitality to visiting teams, no one would take them up on their offers. Most likely, out of county teams simply did not want to deal with the hours or days-long stage trip it took just to get to Lake County. Finally, in 1907 the age of cricket in our county ended with the dissolution of the two clubs, each tired of playing the other. Charles Mifflin Hammond would die in 1915, after spending much of his remaining years pushing for the building of a public high school in Upper Lake and the creation of a railroad into Lake County. He succeeded in doing one, but not the other — I will let you guess which.
In some ways, with the declining importance of the luxury resorts in the county and the sudden appearance of automobiles and highways, the end of cricket and, shortly thereafter, the death of Charles M. Hammond marked the end of an era. The class lines that existed even in such far flung places as Lake County became more blurry as the 20th century progressed. Eventually, the public high schools that Hammond himself advocated for would feature not cricket but baseball, basketball and football teams. The holy trinity had prevailed, but for a few years in Lake County at least its fate was not entirely certain.
Tony Pierucci is Curator of Lake County Museums
