Angel Island Tennis 1874

First Published January, 2024

As you drive north out of San Francisco on the Golden Gate Bridge you can see directly to the east the infamous Alcatraz Island.  Also visible from the bridge one mile to the north of Alcatraz is Angel Island, the 1.16 square mile island where, quite possibly, the game of lawn tennis was played in California for the first time.

The initial clue that suggests that tennis was played in California in 1874 starts in Arizona in the same year.  Long time readers of the TCA Journal may recall that in the Winter 2008 edition I published an article titled “Frontier Tennis in the Arizona Territory”. (Article is available on this website.)

In that article, I related that Martha Summerhayes wrote in her book “Vanished Arizona: Recollections of My Army Life” that she witnessed fellow residents of Fort Apache playing tennis shortly after her arrival there on October 7, 1874 following an arduous 2,100 mile journey from the Camp Reynolds military base on Angel Island.

The only player that Martha identified by name in her book was Ella Wilkins Baily, who had recently arrived at Fort Apache in the same traveling party as Martha. Ella was the wife of the 8th Infantry Lieutenant Charles Baily and the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel John Wilkins, commander of nearby Fort Whipple in Prescott, which was located 17 miles southwest of Fort Apache. 

While Ella played tennis, Martha wrote that Ella’s baby boy was “asleep in the baby carriage, which they had brought all the way from San Francisco”.  It is a virtual certainty that the tennis set also arrived at Fort Apache with the same two month expedition that brought the carriage from Angel Island.

From 1866 through 1886, Angel Island was the embarkation point for all soldiers and supplies sent to fight in the “Indian Wars” in the American Southwest.  Since there were no railroads in Arizona, the best route to Fort Apache began by  traveling by steamship down the Baja of California and up the Gulf of California to the mouth of the Colorado River, then taking another steamship 200 miles north to Fort Mojave before traveling by mule drawn wagons for the final leg of the journey.

Logic dictates that if a tennis set was to be packed and transported on such a rigorous journey that it claimed the lives of three soldiers, one or more of the travelers had to have had prior experience with the game before they left Angel Island on August 6, 1874 or it never would have made the packing list.

Evidenced by her getting the court set up and playing very shortly after arriving, Ella almost certainly had played the game before.  According to her book, Martha and her husband, Lieutenant John Summerhayes, played tennis at every posting that they were assigned to in the West from California to Arizona to Nebraska.

Implicitly, that means that tennis was being played in the San Francisco Bay area before the journey’s start date of August 6, 1874.  Since the soldiers and their families were stationed on the island, it is very unlikely that they left the island by boat to play tennis and, as you will read, tennis was a very popular pastime on Angel Island.

Angel Island

Angel Island was designated a military reserve by President Millard Fillmore in 1850.  Prior to that, the island had been used for cattle grazing and as a meeting place for pirates, smugglers and men from San Francisco fighting pistol duels.

In 1863, the War Department established Camp Reynolds on the island and installed three artillery batteries to defend against a possible Confederate attack on San Francisco.  The guns, although manned every day, never fired a shot other than to celebrate holidays.

There is a version of an old saying that goes “Soldiering is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror”.  It is the 99% that leaders of armies have been equally concerned with through the years.  They wanted to keep their soldiers active and in good physical condition.

Sports played a large role in filling the downtime for soldiers in post-1850 armies.  It is not a coincidence that British soldiers stationed in India invented the modern version of badminton in the early 1870’s or that Mary Outerbridge obtained one of the earliest tennis sets brought to the U.S. from British soldiers in Bermuda.

The British were very serious about military sports feeling that they boosted morale and built unit cohesion.  Consequently, a tradition developed that overseas military and diplomatic posts were usually among the first to receive new sports equipment.

Former 1st Dragoon Guard and lawn tennis inventor Major Walter Wingfield realized this as well, when in March, 1874 he placed one of the very first ads for his new lawn tennis sets in the “Army and Navy Gazette,” which was distributed to military units throughout the British Empire.

The Army commanders at Camp Reynolds obviously embraced the same philosophy regarding sports. Why else would a 740 acre island have three tennis courts and a handball court?  Being that they were surrounded by water, the military personnel stationed at Camp Reynolds, which numbered 241 including family members in an 1870 report, were essentially captives there.  Consequently, diversions such as tennis and handball on the island were important to their mental, as well as their physical health.

Angel Island Tennis Court Circa 1890-1900

The question of how the tennis equipment was obtained is an interesting one.  Ella’s husband, Lt. Charles Baily was a U.S. Army Quartermaster whose primary duties included purchasing, transporting and distributing supplies for the 8th Infantry.

While Charles Baily was procuring supplies in San Francisco prior to the August, 1874 journey, one of his suppliers or even the British Consul himself could have recently received tennis equipment from England, so in the tradition of military fitness, he purchased a set.

In any case, it was almost certainly acquired in San Francisco.  There are really only two ways that the equipment could have arrived in San Francisco.  The first is the transcontinental railroad, which was finished in 1869 and took a minimum of six days to travel coast to coast.

The second and most likely transportation mode was by ship from London to San Francisco.  The 1874 San Francisco City Directory lists several English importers with the most prominent, and the most likely candidate to have early access to lawn tennis sets, being the British Consul in San Francisco, W. Lane Booker, who was also a principal in the Royal Mail Steamship Company.

Consul Lane’s company would deliver goods from London to the east coast of the Isthmus of Panama where it would be transported overland to the western coast.  There the cargo would be loaded on a ship from the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and be delivered directly to San Francisco before possibly making its way to Angel Island.

The earliest pictorial documentation of Camp Reynolds tennis is the attached photograph of a tennis court and barracks dated 1890-1900 that was taken by an island resident.  I also found layout sketches of the East and West Garrisons on the island dated 1915 (by that time Camp Reynolds had been renamed Fort McDowell) that shows the location of two tennis courts and a handball court on the east side and a single tennis court at the west encampment.

1915 East Angel Island Map With Two Tennis Courts (#21)

However, much of the information pertaining to tennis being played at Camp Reynolds and Fort Apache is anecdotal history (which is a significant portion of all history) taken from the Martha Summerhayes book, which was published in 1908.

It is clear that tennis was an integral part of life on Angel Island and during my extensive research I have never encountered any refutation of Martha’s well-read book regarding tennis or any part of her life story.  However, it is impossible at this point to say with absolute certainty when tennis was first played at Camp Reynolds.

My personal conclusion, now that I have done the research, is that Martha’s writing rings true.  As for being the first tennis played in California, I believe that Ella and others played at Camp Reynolds prior to August 6, 1874. If that is not the first lawn tennis played in California, it is certainly among the earliest tennis played in the state.

Tennis grew at a much slower pace on the west coast than the east.  The earliest California lawn tennis club that I have discovered is the San Rafael Club, which was founded by a group of English expatriates in October, 1880 only nine miles north of Angel Island.  The famous California Tennis Club in San Francisco, which claims to be “The oldest tennis club west of the Mississippi” was established in 1884 - a full decade after lawn tennis was initially played on a small island in the San Francisco Bay.

Good Collecting.