George Adams

George Henry Adams

• Bats Right, Throws Right
• Height 5' 6", Weight 175 lb.

• Debut June 14, 1879
• Final Game June 21, 1879
• Born January 25, 1855 in Worcester, MA USA
• Died October 11, 1920 in Clarkston, WA USA

BR page

Biographical Information

George Adams played four games for the Syracuse Stars in 1879. Although his birth and death places were unknown at the time, the Grafton Historical Society stated that he played for Grafton in 1875 along with Asa Stratton and Hick Carpenter. Source: Historical Society. He also played with Hall of Famer Candy Cummings on the 1877 Lynn team. In fact, he was on quite a few strong non-major league teams from 1873 to 1881.

Peter Morris [1] states that Adams probably died in Washington in 1920. Morris later explained that it took him 20 years of research to track Adams down with certainty, but he managed to conclusively link the man who died in Washington in 1920 with the ballplayer. Among the many difficulties he faced were that all the censuses taken during Adams's young years gave slightly different information, and then he moved from Syracuse, where he worked as a bartender, to Chicago, IL, where he lived from 1883 to 1893 while working as a baggage handler. He then headed further west; his family, still in Massachusetts, thought he had headed to the Klondike and met an untimely death, but he had in fact settled in Idaho. He died in Clarkston, WA, and was buried across the Snake River in Lewiston, ID.

While the name George Adams sounds very much like it would be from an old stock Massachusetts family, his father's birth name was Delorme, a common French Canadian name, and both of his parents were born in Canada, settling in Vermont for a time before settling down in Massachusetts. His parents then reverted to their birth names after their children were grown.

Further Reading

• "George Adams Found", in Bill Carle, ed.: Biographical Research Committee Report, SABR, May/June 2015, pp. 1-5.