Three weeks into the Kentucky-Illinois-Tennessee League's first season, in June 1903, the Western Sun of Vincennes, Indiana ran a small item under the headline "Their New Names." The new league's teams, the paper noted, had already received a few nicknames from the press and the fans. Hopkinsville had become the Hoppers. Henderson was the Hens, Cairo the Egyptians, Clarksville the Villagers. And for Vincennes, the paper listed two candidates still fighting it out: "Chaney's Pets," after manager H.L. Chaney, and the Alices, after a teenage girl who never existed.
Her name was Alice Roussillon, and three years earlier she had been the most famous fictional person in America. In 1900, the Indiana writer Maurice Thompson published Alice of Old Vincennes, a Revolutionary War romance about an orphan girl raised by a French family in frontier Vincennes who raises the American flag over Fort Sackville during George Rogers Clark's 1779 campaign. The novel was a phenomenon. It was the tenth best-selling book in the United States in 1900, the second best-selling book of 1901, and the country's number one seller for six consecutive months in The Bookman's rankings. Thompson did not live to see most of it: he died in February 1901, at 56, at the exact summit of his popularity. So when professional baseball came to Vincennes, the real town where the fictional Alice raised her flag and the oldest town in Indiana, her name went into the mix. The manager's name was the ordinary choice, the way these things usually went. The girl won.
Vincennes had earned its place in the league the hard way. The town's first try at professional baseball, in 1896, collapsed within days. And when the KITTY League held its final organizational meeting in April 1903, most of the delegates favored giving the eighth franchise to Madisonville, Kentucky, which sat more conveniently between the league's other towns. It took a forceful argument from Chaney the manager, who pledged that Vincennes would sell its required stock and prove it could support a team, before the league relented and admitted Vincennes, conditionally, on the promise that the town would show what it could do at the gate.
The gate was exactly where the trouble came. Indiana law made it a crime, punishable by a fine of up to twenty-five dollars, to play baseball for admission money on a Sunday, the one day of the week most working people could attend. A bill to repeal the ban died in the legislature that winter; by March the Vincennes papers reported it killed for good. Then, the very week the league opened play in May, the Vincennes Ministerial Association published a formal appeal against the new club's plan to host Sunday league games, closing with an instruction to the faithful in capital letters: "DO NOT PATRONIZE THE SUNDAY BASE BALL GAMES." A team admitted by the league on the condition that it prove it could draw crowds began its life with its best drawing day under legal and moral siege.
Five weeks into the season it was over for the Alices. With the team sitting at the bottom of the standings at 11-18, the Paducah News-Democrat reported on June 20 that Vincennes had been dropped from the league, adding, in the same column, that people in Vincennes were now working to break up the KITTY League entirely and form a new one. The revenge league got as far as a name and a list of towns: a proposed "Two-I" circuit of nearby Indiana and Illinois towns, Washington, Brazil, Princeton, Linton, Mt. Vernon, and Mt. Carmel. By late July the Vincennes Commercial conceded the scheme had probably fallen through. Vincennes was out of baseball before its first summer ended.
Vincennes got back in for 1904, and the town had clearly learned its lesson about money. An association of local businessmen formed and pledged to fund the club through the entire season, as the Indianapolis News put it, "providing it proves to be a losing venture." No more mid-season drops. They hired a genuine name to run it: "Wee Willie" Popp, a pitcher who had spent time with the St. Louis Cardinals, signed at $150 a month plus expenses to pitch, manage, and take complete charge of the team. The 1904 club wore red, and following the era's other great naming convention, the color of the shirts, the papers called them the Vincennes Reds. The guaranteed-funded, big-league-managed Reds finished dead last, 50-73, twenty-three and a half games out.
The 1905 club that took the field, meanwhile, had solved the name question by ignoring it. Searching the papers of 1905 and 1906, references to a specific moniker came up empty, and the team was simply "Vincennes" or "the locals"; no nickname stuck to it at all in its own time. One writer briefly tried "Kolb's Kittens," a KITTY League pun that deserved a longer life than it got.
The Kolb in question was the new manager, Eddie Kolb, and he carried one of the strangest resumes in baseball, though it was either forgotten or swept under the rug in Vincennes. In October 1899, Kolb had been a teenage cigar-stand clerk at the Gibson House hotel in Cincinnati, where the Cleveland Spiders, then finishing the worst season in major league history at 20-134, stayed for their final series. Kolb talked manager Joe Quinn into letting him pitch the last game of the season, reportedly in exchange for a box of cigars. He went the distance, gave up 19 runs, lost 19-3, and never appeared in a major league game again. It was the final game the Cleveland Spiders ever played. Six years later, the man who had pitched the worst team in baseball history into its grave was managing Vincennes.
He turned out to be good at it. The 1905 Alices went 65-41 and were chasing first-place Paducah when the season stopped cold: on August 17, with yellow fever spreading through the lower Mississippi Valley, the league got permission from the National Association to halt play entirely, with Paducah up four and a half games. Instead of ending there, Vincennes and Paducah settled it on the field, playing a 13-game marathon championship series that Vincennes won seven games to six. The Alices were champions of a season ended by an epidemic, decided by a thirteen-game series.
In 1906, Vincennes left no room for argument, running away with the pennant at 79-49 under Kolb, behind pitcher Hub Perdue, who led the league with 25 wins and 260 strikeouts on his way to an eventual big-league career with the Braves and Cardinals. Back-to-back championships for a town the league had not even wanted three years earlier.
The wandering years followed. Vincennes sat out 1907, spent 1908 in the Eastern Illinois League (which folded that August), sat out 1909, then rejoined the reformed KITTY League in 1910 and promptly won it again, going 64-54 behind player-manager John Nairn, who led the league in hitting at .285 while Lyman Johnson led it with 20 wins. Then came another name experiment: the 1911 club played as the Vincennes Hoosiers and finished in the middle of the pack. By the franchise's final season in 1913 the Alice name was circulating again, though mostly in out-of-town papers. At home, the team was still usually just Vincennes. The season itself was grim, a 34-92 last-place finish that ran through four managers. One of them was Ollie Pickering, a 30-year baseball lifer who, as Cleveland's leadoff man on April 24, 1901, had been the first batter in the history of the American League. When the league contracted in 1914, Vincennes was out of professional baseball, and apart from a brief revival decades later, that was the end.
Here is the strangest part of the whole timeline, and it is something the record books hide: across the franchise's entire run, the Alice name appears in the newspapers only in flickers: the nickname lists of that first June in 1903, then years of near-silence through the championship summers of 1905 and 1906, when the team was simply Vincennes, a champion with no nickname at all, then scattered mentions around 1913, mostly in other towns' papers. Outsiders called them the Alices more than Vincennes ever did. Yet every reference book today lists those pennant winners as the Vincennes Alices. The town tried every naming convention its era offered: the manager's name, Chaney's Pets, never caught on; the uniform color, the Reds, finished last; the state-pride name, the Hoosiers, finished fourth. The name that ended up attached to it all was Alice's, and it got there not by winning any single moment but by outlasting all of them. Memory chose her.
And the name refused to die with the franchise. In 1923, the name finally came home: Vincennes Lincoln High School adopted the Alices for its teams, and more than a century later, they are the Alices still. The novel itself faded within a few years of Thompson's death, the way most bestsellers do; almost nobody reads Alice of Old Vincennes today. But in one Indiana river town, the fictional girl outlived her book, her author, and the ballclub that first borrowed her name. Even the ground is still there: Columbia Park, where the Alices played, was renamed Kimmell Park in 1938 and remains a public park today, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Ollie Pickering stayed too, living in Vincennes until his death in 1952, the first batter in American League history at rest in the town of a heroine who never lived at all.
Our Vincennes Alices design puts Alice herself at the plate, bat over her shoulder and tricorn hat on her head, honoring the fictional heroine whose name Vincennes has never let go.
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