Louis Henke was a native of Cincinnati, Ohio. His exact date of birth is not known; the best guess is that he was born sometime in 1860. As a young man he worked as a blacksmith and played baseball for a number of teams in the greater Cincinnati area, including the Ravens and the Clippers. More ignominiously, on Thanksgiving night 1881, Henke was arrested and charged with assault with intent to kill after an altercation outside of a saloon near his home. He had tried to calm one James Tillet (who Henke happened to know from work), an inebriated man who had caused a commotion inside the saloon. While trying to convince Tillet to go home quietly, he was suddenly struck by Tillet on the jaw. The blow staggered Henke; as he steadied himself and turned to confront Tillet, the drunken man pulled a knife. Henke warded off the man’s attack, and as Tillet turned to re-enter the saloon from which he had been banished, Henke picked up a “bowlder” from the street and threw it at his assailant. His innate baseball talent served him well, much to Tillet's detriment. The projectile struck Tillet in the head above the ear and fractured his skull. He died the following Monday from his injury. Henke went to trial in May 1882; the jury accepted his claim of self-defense and found him not guilty of the charges.(1) Now a free man, in July of that year he married Maggie Herbst. They would have one son together before tragedy struck.

Henke played for the Portsmouth, Ohio team in the Ohio State League in 1884. He left that team for some unknown reason late in the season (maybe it had something to do with the seven errors he committed at third base in an exhibition game on August 18 against Cincinnati’s American Association team).(2) He first appeared in Atlanta in September 1884 as a member of a visiting nine from Georgetown (KY) in town to play the “Atlantas” – a semi-pro team established in mid-July of that same year.

The Atlantas represented the Atlanta Athletic Club, which had been established that summer to provide young men with the opportunity to engage in a number of “manly” sporting activities. (It has no connection to the current AAC; the initial effort evidently failed within a year or two of forming.) While the AAC planned to provide grounds for football, lacrosse, tennis, cricket, trap shooting and bicycle racing, it most immediately set out to establish a baseball team in order to take advantage of the re-emerging rise in popularity of that sport around the state. The AAC established a club grounds (Athletic Park, aka Peters Park) at the corner of West Peachtree Street and North Avenue in the northern outskirts (at that time, anyway!) of the city and built a new baseball park within those grounds. Playing their first game on July 24, a loss at home against the Augusta Browns, the Atlantas quickly became a popular foe for other teams from around the state, both because of their rapidly growing reputation for solid play and the ability to draw good crowds at both home and visiting ballparks.

*The author would like to thank SABR members Bob Barrier, Craig Brown, Greg Gagus John Hill, Brian Morrow and Bob Crotty for their assistance on this article. The author bears sole responsibility for the content .

Notes:

(1) See "L'Assommoir" Cincinnati Daily Gazette, November 25, 1881, p3 and "The Killer of Tillett Gets Free" Cincinnati Daily Gazette, May 6, 1882, p7.

(2) "A Day of Surprises" Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, August 19, 1884, p3.