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Date
2025
Abstract
George William Castone was a Black baseball player during the 1880s and 1890s. He pitched for integrated town teams and minor league teams, as well as Black clubs, such as the Lincoln Giants in Nebraska and the Cuban Giants in the northeastern United States. Most of his time on the diamond was spent in Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska, but Castone also played on an otherwise white barnstorming team organized in Salt Lake City that traveled through Montana, Oregon, and California. He was among the few Black players on minor league teams in the Colorado State League in 1889 and the Nebraska State League in 1892, before the color line barring Black players from organized baseball was firmly drawn. In the early twentieth century, Castone was a waiter and an artist, best known for his oil-on-canvas paintings. He passed away in St. Paul, Minnesota in January 1967, just a few days before his 100th birthday. This essay was originally published in 2019 and has undergone revisions and corrections for its release in 2025 as part of the five-volume anthology Peeking through the Knothole. The open-access, digital version of this essay is available through the “Download” button on this webpage. The print-on-demand version is available through the “Buy this Book” button for volume two of the anthology (Baseball Biographies with Kansas Connections).
Keywords
George Castone, William Castone, Bud Fowler, Frank Maupin, John Patterson, George Taylor, Colorado State League, Nebraska State League, Lincoln Giants, Cuban Giants, Kansas City Maroons, Lawrence Eagles, Topeka Athletics, Denver Solis, Concordia, Aspen, Salt Lake City, baseball.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
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© The Author (s)
Recommended Citation
Eberle, Mark E., "George William Castone: An Integrated Baseball Life at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, Revised" (2025). Monographs. 6.
DOI: 10.58809/XYFZ5560
Available at:
https://scholars.fhsu.edu/all_monographs/6
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For questions contact ScholarsRepository@fhsu.edu
Originially Published 2019
Revised Edition 2025