The Florence Eagles emerged in 1865, as the Civil War drew to a close, as one of early baseball’s legendary teams. The Army of the Potomac had its own championship team made up mainly of youths from Western Massachusetts, and after one member wrote home to Florence proposing a game against a local club, young men from several area teams quickly joined the Florence Eagles. On August 1, 1865, they played the team of returned veterans and won to widespread surprise. That year’s players included Luther Askin, thought to be the first African-American to play on an integrated baseball team in the nation. Through the rest of that summer, the Eagles defeated teams from Conway, Amherst College, Easthampton, and Haydenville. During the winter of 1865-66, membership grew to as many as 100, giving the club enough support to challenge teams beyond the area. They traveled to New York to face the Brooklyn Excelsiors and Brooklyn Atlantics, the two most powerful clubs of the day, and lost; their five-run defeat to the Atlantics on November 5, 1866, carried no disgrace because the Atlantics were regarded as national champions. In 1867, the Eagles beat teams from across the Northeast, including clubs from Greenfield, Pittsfield, New Bedford, Meriden, and New London, and were recognized as champions of Western Massachusetts. Invited to Boston to compete against four eastern Massachusetts teams, they reached the finals against the Tri-Mountain Club of Boston but forfeited after concluding that the umpire favored the home team following several disputed calls. The Eagles did not field a team in 1868 or afterward, but across about 60 games they lost only 7, five of them, including the Boston forfeit, against the strongest teams in the nation.