Fargo Divorcees
The Fargo Divorcees, based in Fargo, North Dakota, played the 1897 season in the Red River Valley League, the first circuit in the Dakotas to operate under the umbrella of organized baseball. The nickname is exactly what it sounds like. In 1897 North Dakota required just ninety days of residency before a person could file for divorce, against six months or more everywhere else in the country, and Fargo, the most accessible city in the state, built an industry on it. Attorneys, hotels and boarding houses catered to the trade. The New York Times reported that the city's favorite word was divorcee, "plainly and simply pronounced 'dee-vor-sy.'" Bishop John Shanley of the Catholic Diocese of Fargo campaigned against the law that same year, and the legislature stretched the requirement to a full year in 1899.
The Class F league had four clubs: Fargo, the Moorhead Barmaids across the river in Minnesota, the Grand Forks Senators and the Wahpeton-Breckenridge Methodists. Play opened May 26, 1897, with salaries capped at forty dollars a month. Chauncey Wheeler and state senator W.A. Gordon served as league presidents, Gordon also managing the Grand Forks club.
The name was in print from the start. When the Grand Forks Herald reported Grand Forks beating Fargo 6-3 on May 29 in a gale, it put "Divorcees" in quotation marks, the way a paper handles a nickname everyone already knows. The same account had Fargo third baseman Lyons fined two dollars for cursing umpire Challis and benched by his own captain, the Herald concluding he was far from what could be called a gentlemanly ball player.
Fargo finished last. After a 9-4 loss to Wahpeton-Breckenridge on June 12, the club signed five new players and reorganized on the fly, and it did not help. The Divorcees were 17-29 when the league disbanded on August 8, well behind a Moorhead team that ran away with it at 32-13. Jeff Bozovsky, whose history of the league is the definitive account, notes that the gray uniforms also earned the club the name Greybacks, and that Wahpeton's weekly preferred to call them the Bobolinks, after the songbird, when it wanted to cut them down.
One of those earlier Fargo clubs played the most remarkable game in the region's history. On July 18, 1891 the Fargo Red Stockings and Grand Forks Black Stockings went 25 innings to a 0-0 tie, still the longest scoreless game on record. George Raymer pitched all 25 for Fargo and William Gibbs did the same for Grand Forks. The umpire ended it after the 25th because both clubs had trains to catch. Professional baseball returned to the city with a Fargo club in 1902, the Fargo Browns in 1908 and the Fargo-Moorhead Graingrowers in 1914.
