The Mountain Climbers: Part Two of Two

by Joy Lewis –  The rest of the Team,  continuation from 4-6-2018 

An Allens Hill Base Ball Team ~ Their lives in 1910 and what became of them

This photograph of ten ball players has been dated to about 1910.  The inscription on the back reads “Allen’s Hill base ball team The Mountain Climbers” and includes the names of the men.  A bit of digging into Census records and material on file in the Historian’s office provided information on each player – what they were doing in 1910 and what they accomplished in later years.  They were an interesting bunch.

In our last edition Joy Lewis looked at the lives of five of the team members from the Mountain Climbers.  Here she tells us what became of the other five 1910 era members of this, as she puts it, “interesting bunch.” 

Albert C. Belcher (1884)

In 1910 Albert C. Belcher (1884) was 26 years old and married to Sarah Ward who was expecting their first child.  The Belcher family, whose farm was at the west end of today’s Belcher Road, had lived in Richmond for more than seventy years.  Albert was the youngest of Marshall and Freelove (Webster) Belcher’s eight children.  The only daughter in that bunch was Emma (1869); her son Wales – Albert’s nephew – was also a player on the ball team.  Emma and Albert’s older brother William (1861) was thirty when he had a daughter that he named Emma.  It was this younger Emma Belcher, Albert’s niece, who was soon to marry Peter Cook, another teammate.  The third Belcher son was George (1865).  His son Albert Ellsworth Belcher was born in 1897 and named in honor of his close-in-age uncle.  In June of 1918 Albert E. Belcher was killed during the Battle of Belleau Wood in France.

Albert and Sarah lived all their lives in Allens Hill where their nine children were born: Thelma, Harold, Beulah, Beatrice, Winifred, Harland, Marion, John, and Raymond.  He was a successful farmer and a custom thresher.  Throughout his life he enjoyed good health until age sixty-eight when a car accident in May 1952 curtailed his activities.  He served as the Richmond Tax Assessor for nine years until his death on October 23, 1961.

Peter Cook (1883)

Peter Cook (1883) was a single man, twenty-seven years old in the spring of 1910.  By the end of that summer he was a married man.  His bride was Emma Belcher (1891), the granddaughter of William and Freelove Belcher.  Emma was the niece of Peter’s teammate Albert Belcher.  She was also a cousin of Wales Duffy, another Mountain Climber.

Peter’s father was born in England, his mother in Ireland.  They came to New York late in the nineteenth century and settled in Rochester.  By 1910 Peter had made his way to Allens Hill where he was the hired man on the James Olmstead farm.  All his life he worked as a hired man on various farms in Ontario and Monroe Counties.  He and Emma had one son, William, with whom they lived in their old age.  Peter died in 1957; both he and Emma are buried in Allens Hill Cemetery.

Joshua Simpson (1842)

Joshua Simpson, born in England in 1842, came to Richmond as a nine-year-old boy.  Within the year his father had died; his mother remarried a man who lived in Livonia.  More than ten years would pass before Joshua returned to Richmond.  About 1868 he married Elizabeth Whisker and purchased a farm on the east side of the Allens Hill community.  Elizabeth gave birth to six sons and a daughter; Otis (1883) was the youngest.  He and his brother Grant were the only two of the Simpson children to marry.  Grant was the father of one son – Clifford, born in 1908, who was to be Joshua and Elizabeth’s only grandchild.

In 1910 Otis was twenty-seven, married for four years to Almina Fairhead.  They owned a home in Allens Hill.  Otis called himself an “odd job man,” working for area farmers as mechanic and carpenter; Mina was a dressmaker.  For a few years they operated the General Store in Allens Hill.  In his later years Otis served as the area Road Patrolman and also worked as caretaker for the owner of a lakeside cottage.  He died in August of 1951.

Lafayette Johnson (1880)

Lafayette Johnson (1880) was born in Naples.  Before he turned twelve he was orphaned.  After the death of his parents he lived with his older sister Almeda and brother George.  The two oldest Johnson girls, Ida and Lois, had married and left the family farm.

Twenty-nine years old in 1910, Fay was married to Jessie and the father of two young children: Eleanor was six and Harrison, two.  The family lived in Allens Hill and Fay worked as the hired man on an area farm.  He left Richmond within the year; it seems that he and Jessie may have separated as he was living as a single man in Yates County by 1915.  No record has been found of his death.

Fred Decker (1875)

The oldest man on the Mountain Climbers team was Fred Decker, thirty-five in 1910.  Fred was a barber, with a shop was on Main Street in Honeoye.  His parents were Edwin Decker and Lydia Childs.  He had five siblings: Albert and George were older than he; Mary, Alice, and Howard were younger.  His sister Alice was married to Herbert Deuel; their son Burton (Fred’s nephew), who was then eight years old, would sit down more than seventy years later and write a memoir of life in Honeoye as he had known it.  (This fine collection of stories, which Burton called “Reminiscences” is on file at the Richmond Historian’s Office.)

Fred had been married for five years to June Lambert and they had a young son, Claud.  It was not a marriage made in heaven, however.  In fact their divorce made such a sensation in the area that the proceedings were covered in the local newspapers.

The Geneva Daily Times of August 14, 1916 reported:  “A final decree of divorce was entered today in the case of Fred W. Decker against June R. Decker, East Bloomfield parties. Affairs of the Deckers were aired in a divorce trial in supreme court here about a year ago. A jury found both guilty of adultery and the trial went to a draw. The interlocutory decree was taken by Decker against his wife last April, it being granted by Justice Clark.”

The headline of a Canandaigua paper announced: “Divorce for Fred W. Decker,” with the story filling in the details: “In the Ontario county clerk’s office to-day was filed a final decree divorcing Fred W. Decker from his wife, June R. Decker, both of  East Bloomfield. The interlocutory decree was obtained last April. The Decker divorce case came up more than a year ago and was tried before a jury which found both parties guilty and denied a judgment to either of them. The case was retried, however, without a jury and no defense was interposed by the  wife.”

The Livonia Gazette reported on August 15, 1916 “The Decker divorce case has finally resulted in a victory for Fred W. Decker, the husband, who is now free to remarry if he so desires.  A final decree of divorce was entered in the Ontario County clerk’s office yesterday freeing him from his wife, June Decker.  The Deckers reside at East Bloomfield.”

June Decker died in 1918; shortly afterward Fred remarried and opened a barber shop in Manchester.  He died in 1939 at age sixty-four.

The photograph of this ball team captures one frozen moment in time.  The Mountain Climbers existed as a team for some years prior to 1910 and continued to play ball for a decade or more after that time.  Names of other players in other years have not been recorded – or at least have not yet been found.  If any reader has information, family stories, documents, or artifacts pertaining to baseball in Richmond, please contact the Historian’s office at 229-1128.