Home | Information | Contents | Search | Links |
Henry Chadwick, son of James Chadwick the editor of the Western Times of Exeter, England, was born in that town October 5, 1824. He came to America in 1838, and lived in New York and Brooklyn thereafter. He was educated in the public schools, and in 1844 began writing for the Long Island Star. He began writing sports articles for the New York Times and the Brooklyn Eagle in 1856, and from 1860 to 1881, that is, from the first number to the last, he was editor of Beadle's Base-Ball Player, and when that series became Spalding's Official Baseball Guide, he edited that each year from 1881 to 1908. For Beadle he also wrote five of their Handbooks of Sports, and for a time conducted a "Field Sports and Pastimes" column in The Saturday Journal and The Young New Yorker. For over thirty years he was on the staff of the famous sporting paper, the New York Clipper. He was also editor of the Ball Players' Chronicle, beginning June 6, 1867. During the Civil War he was a reporter for the New York Tribune. He gave up reporting in 1886, but continued his contribution to the journals. He was married to Miss Jane Botts of Richmond, Virginia, in 1848. She was born July 24, 1819 and died May 19, 1915. He died in Brooklyn, April 20, 1908. His gravestone, in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, is decorated with a mask and other baseball paraphernalia.
REFERENCES: Publishers' Weekly, LXXIII, 1908, 1458; New York Daily Tribune, April 21, 1908; Brooklyn Eagle, April 20, 1908.
Base-Ball Players 1860 to 1881
Handbooks of Games and Pastimes
Dime Book of Cricket, 1860
Dime Book of Yachting and Rowing, 1867
Dime Book of Skating and Curling, 1867
Dime Book of Pedestrianism, 1867
Dime Book of Winter Sports, 1879