page_title: Ferdinand E. Kuhn
section_title: 1908–1910
hierarchical_section_title: Ferdinand E. Kuhn / Nashville Vols / 1908–1910
caption_attribution_description: From left to right - Judge Wm M. Kavanaugh, President of the Southern League; Ex-Major James S Brown, Mr. F. E. Kuhn, President Nashville Baseball Club; Mr. R. J. Chambers, former Presdent Montgomery Baseball Club; and Alfred Williams, a Baseball Enthusiast of Nashville
context_page_description: Ferdinand Emery Kuhn was a shoe merchant known as the "Father of the Knights of Columbus in the South." He was also president of the 1908 Southern Association champion Nashville Vols baseball team.
context_section_description: Kuhn hired Bill Bernhard as manager. In 1908 the team won the Southern pennant by beating the New Orleans Pelicans in the last game, described by Grantland Rice as the "greatest game ever played in Dixie".
  Nashville entered the final day of that season on September 19 with an opportunity to win the league pennant. The championship would be decided by the last game of the season at Sulphur Dell. Both teams had the same number of losses (56), but the Pelicans were in first place with 76 wins to the Vols' second-place 74. A crowd of 11,000 spectators, including Kuhn, who sat next to Mayor James Stephens Brown, saw Carl Sitton hurl a three-hit, 1–0 shutout, giving Nashville their third Southern Association pennant by 0.1 percentage points (57.25% to 57.14%). Ted Breitenstein was New Orleans's pitcher.
  One account reads: "By one run, by one point, Nashville has won the Southern League pennant, nosing New Orleans out literally by an eyelash. Saturday's game, which was the deciding one, between Nashville and New Orleans was the greatest exhibition of the national game ever seen in the south and the finish in the league race probably sets a record in baseball history."
  The championship banner was presented to Kuhn by league president William Marmaduke Kavanaugh, and it hung over the window of Kuhn's shoe store until the banner raising ceremony on Opening Day, 1909.
  Kuhn also invented a kind of electric scoreboard. In the 1909 season, New Orleans, Mobile, Montgomery, Memphis, and Atlanta used his design. John Heisman was president of the Atlanta team.
  Following the 1910 season, Kuhn resigned as the team's president. He was succeeded by Hirsig. Kuhn was always careful with the team's money, and one newspaper called it the end of the "tightwad" regime.
caption: Kuhn (middle) with Southern Association president William Marmaduke Kavanaugh (left)
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