Day Trip
Williamsport, Pa.: Home of True Small Ball

More than 90 mansions are on Fourth Street.

By DAVE CALDWELL
The New York Times
Published: July 20, 2007

WILLIAMSPORT, Pa., is a quaint industrial river city with 30,000 residents and a trove of diamonds. There are plenty of other treasures, too. But first, those diamonds.

The diamonds are baseball fields, and as befits the place where Little League Baseball was born, they seem to be everywhere. They beckon anyone to wander onto the green, green grass for a simple, yet essential, American ritual: a game of catch.

My two sons and I dug through the trunk of my car on a recent visit and rustled up a baseball and three gloves. We parked next to the Original Little League complex on West Fourth Street, walked onto a field, then threw to our heart’s content.

The two fields there are wedged between the street and a grassy, pitched levee, built to hold back the wide, muddy West Branch of the Susquehanna River. Thousands of fans sat on that levee to watch the first Little League World Series games in 1947.

The Maynard Little League, a team with its headquarters just a few blocks away, won the championship that first year. These days, thousands of fans sit on tumbling slopes outside the outfield fences at Howard J. Lamade Stadium in South Williamsport to watch the series every August. (This year’s Little League World Series is scheduled to start on Aug. 17.)

But Williamsport is more than baseball. Before there was baseball, there was lumber, lots of it.

More than a century ago, Williamsport, nestled in the Allegheny Mountains, was a lumber hub. Lumber barons built mansions in the late 1800s on Fourth Street, a tree-lined boulevard that parallels the river.

West Fourth Street became known as Millionaires Row, and it was said that there were more millionaires per capita in Williamsport than anywhere in the world. (The local high school’s sports teams are still called the Millionaires.)

“Each time they’d build, they’d try to outbuild all the rest of them,” said Dr. Randall F. Hipple, a retired obstetrician who helped establish a seven-block stretch of the street as a National Historic District.

There are more than 90 mansions on Millionaires Row, and they run the architectural gamut: Romanesque, Italianate, Queen Anne, Gothic, Second Empire, Colonial Revival.

The row is ideal for a leisurely stroll — all the better to catch the intricacies of houses that were built with meticulous craftsmanship. Trolley tours leave three times a day Tuesday through Friday and twice on Saturdays from the Peter Herdic Transportation Museum, which is behind Trinity Episcopal Church.

“You can sort of put yourself back in the day,” said Edward Lyon, a developer who is chairman of Preservation Williamsport.

Seven blocks farther west on Fourth Street, history of another kind was made in 1939. One day, while playing baseball with his two nephews, Carl E. Stotz, who worked as a clerk in a Williamsport lumberyard, stumbled over a lilac bush and scraped his ankle.

The mishap, the story goes, got him to thinking: What if children could play baseball under the same conditions as adults did, with groomed fields, full uniforms and a standard set of rules?

He scaled down a baseball field, putting the bases 60 feet apart instead of 90, and the pitcher’s mound 46 feet from home plate instead of 60 feet 6 inches. He laid out the diamond in a park near his home and secured three corporate sponsors — at $30 each.

A plaque is at the site of the first Little League game, which was played on June 6, 1939, and won by Lundy Lumber over Lycoming Dairy, 23-8. Soon Mr. Stotz found a field across West Fourth Street for a permanent home for his organization.

This, as the sandstone clubhouse between the two diamonds proclaims, is “The Birth Place of Little League.” The fields are still used, by what is called the Original Little League, which is not affiliated with Little League Baseball Inc.

Believing that Little League had become too popular and widespread, Mr. Stotz had a falling-out with the board of directors in 1955 and dissociated himself from the organization. But the Original Little League opens its clubhouse to visitors during the Little League World Series.

“We have people from all over the world come and visit us,” said Bill Bair, a volunteer for the Original Little League who is 80 and who played first base for Lycoming Dairy in that first game. “They like to see where it all began.”

If you want to see grownups play baseball, Bowman Field sits across West Fourth Street from the Original Little League complex. Bowman, which seats 4,200, was built in 1926 and is home to the Williamsport Crosscutters, a Philadelphia Phillies farm team and a member of the Class A New York-Penn League.

For a meal, you can go to Billuccho’s, on Lycoming Creek Road, for a spicy or sweet sausage sandwich with onions and peppers or a chicken cheesesteak. But save room. Sunset Ice Cream is right down the street. A double-dip of its ice cream sets you back all of $3, and there are dozens of flavors to choose from.

After your meal, you will still have one more baseball pilgrimage to make, to the Little League complex in South Williamsport. Besides peering into Lamade Stadium and Volunteer Field, the well-groomed ballparks where the World Series is played, you can tour the Peter J. McGovern Little League Museum. More than 25,000 people visit the museum annually, in part because the price is right: $5 for adults, $3 for 62 and older and $1.50 for children 13 and younger.

There are nearly 200,000 Little League teams in all 50 states and more than 80 countries. An estimated 300,000 fans show up — admission is free — for the 10-day World Series.

But the organization’s growth never appealed to Mr. Stotz. In 1989, three years before he died, he told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Little League Baseball was, or should be, the neighborhood organization it was then.”

But, in a way, it is still a neighborhood organization here in Williamsport. One of the two old fields has been named after Mr. Stotz, and just outside the field are three healthy lilac bushes — one for each of the three Original Little League teams.