North Hampton and the Cape Cod Baseball League

North Hampton and the Cape Cod Baseball League?

On a Saturday morning last July and I was reading a Boston Globe story about student interns gaining valuable experience on the broadcast side of the famed Cape Cod Baseball League. Up pops the name Guv Fuller Field and I had to find out more.

I thought immediately of North Hampton’s Alvan Tufts Fuller, a larger than life former governor of Massachusetts whose legacy and largesse through the Fuller Foundation continues to benefit our town.  Think the beautiful Fuller Gardens, a turn of a 20th century garden created for Fuller by world famous landscape architect Arthur Shurtleff and redesigned a few years later by the Olmstead Brothers firm. Also the 1970s library and the new one as well as the Rail Trail kiosk for the New Hampshire Seacoast Greenway’s North Hampton parking area.   

It made sense to me that a ball field might have his name because the young Fuller was an athlete, a champion bicycle racer, who earned a living in bicycle repair.  He became fascinated by automobiles early on, and sold his racing trophies to help finance a trip to Europe in the 1890s to learn about the automobile industry.

Fuller imported two French vehicles, the first automobiles to go through the Boston port and, in 1903, won the franchise to sell Packard automobiles in the Boston area and, a bit later, the Cadillac franchise.   

Fuller’s biographical details are readily available online - the Fuller Foundation and Fuller Garden websites, Wikipedia, and other sites.  Also North Hampton’s only published history The Way it Was in North Hampton by Stillman Moulton Hobbs and Helen Davis Hobbs.

But it turns out that the town athletic field in Falmouth on Cape Cod, constructed in the 1930s with a Depression-era New Deal agency WPA [Work Projects Administration], was named after its long-time high school coach and athletic director, Elmer E. “Guv” Fuller when he retired in 1952.

Elmer had been the high school quarterback in the early 1900s, returning to the school in the 1920s.  His nickname did refer to our Fuller, the Massachusetts governor from 1925 to 1929.

That’s North Hampton’s tenuous relationship to the Cape Cod Baseball League as far as I know.  The field name remains -- the 2025 season for the Falmouth Commodores begins in June and runs until early August -- unless they make the playoffs.  And as the great Ernie Banks of the Cubs famously said, “It’s a beautiful day for a ballgame - let’s play two!”