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'The Daily Hunter' blog: Finding history in a grocery store parking lot

A grocery store parking lot is an odd place to find a couple of gawking tourists, particulary two guys snapping so many photos that their fingers develop callouses.

More than one shopper cast a wary eye at Joe Santry and me, probably wondering whether we were insurance adjusters or just a couple of weirdos. I swear one guy offered sympathetic glance in my direction and shook his head, apparently thinking we were so stupid that we had somehow mistaken the German Village Giant Eagle store on Whittier Street for the Statehouse.

The skepticism was understandable, though.If these guys geeks grocery cart? Blacktop fans? Thieves cereal? Terrorist vegetables? Seriously. That takes pictures in the parking lot of a grocery store, anyway? No-lifers, of course. I could almost read their minds: Why do not these morons buy a gallon of milk, a carton of eggs and a box of Twinkies and continue with their pathetic lives, like the rest of us?

Santry Columbus baseball historian and I'm all around the store, unaware of most of these. We were in search of the second Recreation Park, the one that was built there in the 1880s and hung around long after baseball left in 1895 for new park on Parsons Ave, and eventually to Neil Park at Cleveland and Buckingham Aves. Ohio State played its first home football game at "The Recy," as old-timers called it, in 1890. The Columbus Panhandles professional football team played all of their home games there in 1908. OSU great Chic Harley played his first game there in 1912 for East High School.

We were armed with a map that showed the layout of the park, with surrounding streets and buildings, a map that enabled us to make a fair guess at where home plate lay when the Columbus Buckeyes played in the then-major league American Association with the Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Athletics, St. Louis Browns and others from 1889-91. King Kelly, Dan Brouthers, Hugh Duffy, John McGraw, Dummy Hoy and others played there, so that isn't as insignificant as it might have looked to somebody carrying a grocery sack full of Greek yogurt. But it's also difficult to get a clear read on how the diamond was laid out and where home plate was.

Santry said there is only one known photo of the park, one taken during an Ohio State-Denison football game there in 1891. There is a fence in the background bearing an ad for "Lazarus One-Price Store," a fence Santry says stood at the rear or north end of the park along Kossuth St.

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