March 26, 2026: Historic Baseball Teams: The House of David

[In honor of MLB’s Opening Day, this week I’ll be blogging about historic baseball teams! Leading up to a weekend post on the upcoming second season of my narrative history & baseball podcast.]

Three figures who help us remember the unique and compelling early 20^th century barnstorming team (on whom I thought about focusing for my podcast’s second season, although as I’ll write this weekend I ended up going in a different direction):

1. Benjamin Purnell: That hyperlinked piece covers the complex, compelling, and controversial life of the House of David cult’s co-founder (along with his wife Mary) far more fully than I can in this brief space. But as that piece likewise argues, we likely wouldn’t remember either Purnell or the House of David were it not for one of his more unique fundraising ideas: starting a baseball team. The team began playing in their home city of Benton Harbor, Michigan around 1913, and by 1920 had become one of the nation’s most prominent barnstorming squads, traveling the country (and into Mexico and Canada) and playing against (and sometimes with) Negro League teams among many other professional and semipro outfits. Purnell would die in December 1927, but the baseball team would endure for many years thereafter.
2. Virne Beatrice Mitchell: One of the reasons for the team’s enduring popularity was its ability to sign prominent players who were in no way part of the House beyond baseball. That included professional stars like Grover Cleveland Alexander (who also managed the team) and Satchel Paige, but also and most strikingly included the first woman to sign a contract to play baseball, Virne Beatrice “Jackie” Mitchell. Signed in 1933 when she was just 19 years old (and when Alexander was the manager), a signing due not only to her undeniable talent but also to potentially apocryphal but widespread stories of her having struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an April 1931 exhibition game while she was pitching for the Chattanooga Lookouts AA team, Mitchell was in any case a Depression Era star, and helped keep the House of David team front and center in the baseball world.
3. Joe Palladino Jr.: That wonderful article from Jim Gates for the Baseball Hall of Fame notes that the Hall features a House of David uniform and other memorabilia due to an unexpected and generous gift from Joe Palladino Jr., who played for the team in the late 1940s. Or, well, he sort of did—in 1948, at the age of 17, Palladino was recruited from a South Philadelphia semipro team to play for local businessman Sam Besinoff’s franchised spin-off of the original team. Such franchised teams (there were at least three at once in the late 40s and 50s, as that hyperlinked piece traces) kept some of the original’s unique elements—such as long hair and beards—but were really just sponsored by the House of David, an interesting evolution of both the team and the world of barnstorming that foreshadows the more centralized commercialism of professional sports in the late 20^th century.

Last historic team tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Baseball or sports histories you’d share?