07-01-2021 Howard Mag - Flipbook - Page 66
RETRO HOCO
BY MIKE KLINGAMAN Howard Magazine
The ruins of St. Charles College have been preserved at St. Charles Place and Terra Maria Way in the Terra Maria neighborhood
of Ellicott City. PHOTO BY BARBARA HADDOCK TAYLOR
St. Charles College hosted baseball
1896 Orioles played an exhibition game at the former Ellicott City school
It was a cloudy September morning in 1896
when the Orioles stepped off the train in Ellicott
City and into the crowd gathered to pay homage
to the best team in baseball. Baltimore had just
clinched its third consecutive National League
flag (there was only one league) and the club
had come to play an exhibition game at nearby
St. Charles College.
The students at the Howard County school, a
Roman Catholic seminary founded in 1848, were
geared up as the players approached the winding
drive, and its spouting fountain, in an omnibus
drawn by six horses. Here, in their glory, were the
stars of the game — John McGraw, Willie Keeler,
Hughie Jennings, Wilbert Robinson and Joe
Kelley — all bound, one day, for the Hall of Fame.
Never mind that the pious hosts were to toast a
rough-and-tumble team known for its dirty tricks
and abrasive behavior. During the season, the
Orioles hid extra balls in the outfield and, during
rhubarbs, ground their spikes into umpires’
shoes. That afternoon at St. Charles, however,
the players were as well-behaved as choir boys
during an intrasquad game won by the regulars,
66 | FALL 2021 | howardmagazine.com
St. Charles College in Ellicott City in 1908. HOWARD COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY PHOTO
12-11. Not coincidentally, the Archbishop of
Baltimore was in attendance.
Afterward, at a dinner in the college refectory,
his eminence, James Cardinal Gibbons, himself
a graduate of St. Charles, paid tribute to the
Orioles:
“You have afforded me the pleasure of seeing
my first game of baseball … In former days,
Baltimore was called ‘the city of monuments,’ but
you are 18 living monuments to its greatness. It
was once celebrated for its fast Baltimore clippers,
but I dare say none were so fast as you can run.”
The day was, perhaps, a high point for both
worlds. The old Orioles broke up in 1899,
returning to the majors for good in 1954. And
in 1911, a fire destroyed the college, which was
rebuilt in Catonsville. Several stone walls on St.
Charles Place are all that remain of the old school.
