It was the Golden Era of soccer in the United States, and there was no question about the top team, the Fall River Marksmen. The 1923-24 Marksmen team was a dominant force in the American Soccer League during a time when southeastern New England was known as the “Golden Crescent” of American soccer, encompassing Pawtucket, Fall River, and New Bedford.
Harold Brittan, who netted 15 goals from the striker position, and Bill McPherson, who had an incredible 366 appearances for the Marksmen during his career, led the team in scoring. With Ned Tate from South Shields, England, at fullback, and Findlay “Lindy” Kerr from Scotland as goalkeeper, the Marksmen defense habitually held opponents scoreless, generating an astonishing fourteen clean sheets that season.
The Marksmen completed the historic 1923-24 season with the first “double,” winning the American Soccer League and capturing the National Challenge Cup by defeating the Vesper Buick team in St. Louis. The majority of the Marksmen’s games that season took place at their home field in Tiverton, Mark’s Stadium, named for the team’s owner Sam Mark.
In 1922, Sam Mark (born Sam Markelevitch, in Fall River) bought the Fall River United of the American Soccer League and renamed them the Marksmen. Fall River already had a long history of championship soccer teams. In the late 19th century, the Fall River Rovers dominated play, winning the American Cup in 1888 and 1889.
Sam Mark built the Marksmen a stadium just over the Fall River border in north Tiverton. In Massachusetts, regulations derived from Puritan strictures, known as Blue Laws, restricted a number of activities on Sundays including the playing of sports and the purchase of liquor. By building his field in Rhode Island, where Puritan ideas never held sway, Sam Mark circumvented these laws.
The Marksmen eventually won the American Soccer League title seven times, including four consecutively, and the National Challenge Cup an incredible four times. In 1930, the Marksmen became the first American team to complete a domestic treble, meaning they were champions of America’s top-tier league, and won the National Challenge Cup and the Lewis Cup.
The following year, in a blunder reminiscent of the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees, Sam Mark moved the Marksmen to New York and renamed them the New York Yankees. Unlike Ruth’s Yankees, the team faltered almost immediately and the following year Mark merged the Yankees with the Providence Goldbugs and a team from New Bedford, which became the new home of his team, now called the New Bedford Whalers.
But Mark’s Stadium still had some magic left. Fall River’s Ponta Delgada team, playing in Tiverton, won numerous National Amateur Cup titles in the 1940s and 50s. Mark’s stadium was torn down in the late 1950s and replaced by a drive-in movie theater and a restaurant operated by the Ponta Delgada Club. Today, Mark’s Stadium is only a large empty lot, and the Ponta Delgada club is closed. In 2009, the sports website Bleacher Report named Mark’s Stadium the 8th most important soccer site in the United States.
For more (including 3 images & 1 video) view the original article
]]>A tall man in a long, dark coat and a broad-brimmed hat walked the 2,000 feet across Stone Bridge from the Portsmouth shore to the Tiverton side, where a toll keeper waited to collect his fare. The man passed the money to the keeper, William Cranston, and remarked: “It is a cold blustery day.”
The Stone Bridge keeper’s house provided a warm refuge from the chill of that day, December 20, 1832, but the man declined Cranston’s invitation to come in, saying he was bound for Fall River.
“I shut the gate about sundown,” Cranston later testified, when the man, the Reverend Ephraim Avery, stood trial for the murder of Sarah Maria Cornell, a pregnant Fall River mill worker, whose body was found at sunrise on December 21, hanging from a pole on Job Durfee’s farm.
“There is a way by which passengers can get round the gate at night, after it is closed,” Cranston said. “They have to get down the wall on the beach just where the tide flows, and step up the other side; I sometimes look to see if any people have left tracks passing that way.”
On the morning after the tall man crossed the bridge, Cranston saw tracks “fresh and distinct” in the sand, leading around the toll gate toward the Portsmouth side.
It’s not surprising that Tiverton’s Stone Bridge played a key role in the salacious Avery-Cornell murder trial. For more than 150 years, Stone Bridge acted as a funnel through which anyone traveling across the Sakonnet River on foot, horseback, wagon—or later, automobile and street car—had to pass.
From the 1680s until 1795, when the Rhode Island Bridge Company built a wooden bridge here, a ferry shuttled goods, horses, wagons, and people across the Sakonnet River. The first bridge lasted two years before a high tide swept it away. The rebuilt bridge lasted one year, and ferry service resumed for a decade until subscribers raised $80,000. In 1810, travelers began to cross the new bridge constructed of 280,000 tons of stone at a cost of more than $200,000.
The Great Gale of September 1815 bit a 200-foot chunk out of the bridge, and a gale in 1868 caused a similar breach, prompting the state to take control of a new, toll-free bridge in 1871. The free bridge became a popular spot for hooking striped bass, blue fish, and shark, with one reported landing of a 500-pounder.
Trolley cars from the Newport and Fall River Street Railways began crossing the bridge in 1898, which required replacing the old wooden draw with iron and steel strong enough to hold 20 tons.
On the Tiverton side of the bridge, a village of stores, fish markets, and blacksmith shops blossomed. For more than 100 years, a succession of inns at the foot of the bridge served weary travelers and hosted milestone celebrations for town residents until the 1980s, when the Stone Bridge Inn was razed.
The last car crossed the Stone Bridge on May 6, 1957. The Hurricane of 1938 and Hurricane Carol in `54 weakened the bridge’s approaches and caused service interruptions, leading to construction of the steel Sakonnet River Bridge about a half-mile north of the Stone Bridge. The Sakonnet River Bridge served from 1956 until its replacement was completed in 2012. After almost 150 years of free crossings over the Sakonnet River, tolls may be imposed on the new Sakonnet River Bridge.
Finally, despite testimony that the Reverend Ephraim Avery crossed the bridge into Tiverton, met with Sarah Maria Cornell, and crossed the bridge back to Portsmouth on the night of her murder, he was found not guilty.
]]>