© Tim Peeler, 2026
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As most people know, Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run in Fayetteville, N.C. There’s even a highway marker that commemorates the event from March 7, 1914.
It might be the least interesting thing the Babe ever did in the Old North State, which he visited frequently as a player, a hunter and a consumer, on at least one occasion, of a 40-pound wild pig.
He lived big here, and once reportedly died here.
Ruth is most frequently associated with the good people of Cumberland County, which gleefully basks in the honor of hosting his first professional home run at the Cape Fear Fairgrounds Park in an exhibition game during 1914 spring training.
“I hit it as I hit all the others, by taking a good gander at the pitch as it came up to the plate, twisting my body into a backswing and then hitting it as hard as I could swing.” Ruth said in his later years. “I got to some bigger places than Fayetteville after that, but darn few as exciting.”
The thing the roadside marker doesn’t tell you — and the tidbit that Fayetteville is loath to accept — is that Ruth’s big bash came in a Baltimore Orioles intrasquad game that needed five local sportswriters filling spots in the lineup because there weren’t enough paid players on hand to fill out two rosters.
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| Before the Babe: George Herman Ruth in 1914. (Photo from the Fayetteville Observer.) |
At the time, Ruth was an oversized kid in his first minor league season who mostly took an interest in riding the elevator in the old downtown LaFayette Hotel, a hobby that, combined with his legal adoption by Baltimore manager Jack Dunn, made his slightly envious teammates to call him “Dunn’s newest babe.”
The nickname stuck like a Sandhills sandspur.
Ruth, who was signed out of an orphanage in Baltimore, was legally adopted by Dunn to keep the often rowdy young pitcher with his hometown team, then a minor league franchise, and officially hands off from everyone else.
The story about Ruth’s first home run has been turned into North Carolina lore, but it barely scratches the surface of the Bambino’s association with the state.
Ruth’s career — and life — almost ended at the Asheville train depot in the spring of 1925. Baseball’s emerging slugger was with the Yankees on a southern barnstorming tour, making their way north from St. Petersburg by playing exhibition games against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Ruth wasn’t feeling well in games at Atlanta, Chattanooga and Knoxville. The Babe was suffering from what was thought to be a case of the flu, but he participated in most of the post-spring training contests. Arriving in North Carolina, however, the belting behemoth collapsed in a pile on the mountain station floor and was rushed to the city’s Battery Park Hotel in hopes of reducing his 101-degree temperature.
Rumors immediately began to spread about the cause of what came to be known as “The Bellyache Heard Round the World.” Shortly after, international newspapers picked up a story that originated in Canada that Ruth had died, exacerbated by reports that Ruth fell and wedged himself between the toilet and sink, knocking him unconscious in his specially built Pullman car as the Yankees pulled into Philadelphia’s Union Station.
His death was a surprise to the Babe.
One popular myth, written by a respected sportswriter W.O. McGeehan, was that Ruth’s body rebelled after he ate 12 hot dogs and drank too many carbonated sodas on the barnstorming tour. Another one, spoken only in the presence of men, was that Babe’s other big appetite caused him to contract a venereal disease. One other rumor—that Ruth had too much North Carolina rotgut moonshine—was easily dismissed because Ruth had just entered the city when he collapsed.
All of them, however, were imminently possible.
The most likely cause of abdominal distress was an intestinal abscess caused by a combination of his poor eating, frequent imbibing (even in those days of Prohibition) and excessive indigestion. When he arrived in New York, Ruth had surgery and spent the next two months on bed rest in the hospital. He stayed there until May 27, just four days before he made his 1925 debut.
It’s true that Ruth had the worst offensive season since the end of the deadball era, but his .290 average, with 25 home runs, 67 RBIs and 104 hits would earn him a long-term, multi-million dollar contract in today’s world of swing-and-miss sluggers batting .230.
Exactly one year and a day after his collapse, as the Yankees prepared to play the Dodgers at Charlotte’s Wearn Field, Ruth gave a press conference to update his health and the upcoming 1926 season while laying nude in his hotel room’s king-sized bed, covered only by a thin top sheet as he smoked a large cigar.
Ruth’s collapse and poor season had somewhat of a tempering effect on his lifestyle. He began playing more golf and hunting with friends, including Yankees Hall of Fame general manager Ed Barrow and other elite New Englanders. His appetite was still big but he managed to hide himself in nature, which led to the most productive part of his mammoth career. The Yankees won the American League pennant in 1926 and, the following year, Murderers Row captured New York and the baseball-consuming public by winning the pennant by 19 games and sweeping the Pirates in four games.
How did Babe celebrate his record-shattering 60 home runs, 165 runs batted in and .356 batting average?
He returned to North Carolina.
In the early weeks of 1928, Ruth bolted the celebrations in New York to spend 10 days at one of the country’s most exclusive private hunting clubs, Camp Bryan, some 57,428 acres located about 25 miles south of New Bern in Bladen County near the modern grounds of the Croatan National Forest and the Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point.
For the next seven years, Ruth made an annual pilgrimage to the log cabin with some of the most influential men in New England and eastern North Carolina to see the natural wonders of European settlers’ first hunting grounds.
One of those influencers — Frank Mozley Stevens, the hot dog king of New York — was the concessionaire for most major sporting venues in New York, including the Saratoga race track, Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds and, long after Ruth had died, Shea Stadium. His father is credited with falling in love with Virginia super extra-large peanuts on a similar hunting trip, turning them into a ballpark staple at every concession stand the family operated.
Another friend was Harry “Bud” Fisher, creator of America’s first cartoon strip, “Mutt and Jeff,” and a lifelong thoroughbred horse owner. Fisher liked to doodle on the walls of the hunting lodge, engraving caricatures of the many men who were part of the legendary quests for game.
Barrow, who had managed the Red Sox during Ruth’s days as a pitcher and eventually converted him to a slugging outfielder, was lured south by his old friend George Nicoll, a Boston photographer and businessman who moved to New Bern for health reasons about the same time Stevens first began hunting in that area around 1910.
Nicoll was one of the earliest three dozen members of Camp Bryan, which was founded in 1898 as a hunting preserve across three counties by former Confederate officer and Democrat legislator James Augustus Bryan.
The local hosts of these boisterous trips to the private hunting club included lawyer and politician Frank Sutton Sr. of Kinston and William Benjamin Blades Jr., son of a prominent land developer and lumber mill owner of Beaufort. They often met Ruth’s traveling party for coffee at the Williams Café in Goldsboro, where they changed trains on the main Atlantic Coast Line to the Norfolk Southern route that took them to New Bern.
The friendships were tight and lasting.
On September 10, 1929, some three full years before his famous called shot against the Chicago Cubs in the 1932 World Series, Ruth received his new friend Sutton in the Yankee Stadium lockerroom between games of a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers. Sutton mentioned that his son, Fred Jr., was celebrating his fourth birthday. Babe said he’d try to catch a good pitch and hit the young tyke a homer.
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| Babe Ruth (second from right) with Fred Sutton Jr. on the Suttons' boat The Decoy) |
Sure enough, Ruth came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with two men on base and the Yankees trailing 9-6, found a pitch he liked and clubbed the ball over the rightfield fence for a 3-run homer to tie the game and give young Fred the finest birthday present Ruth ever promised. The Yankees won the game 10-9 a few minutes later when Detroit reliever Emil Yde walked Yankees pinch hitter Cedric Durst with the bases loaded.
Ruth was an avid hunter and fisherman, like Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams who hunted and fished the same woods while stationed at Cherry Point during the Korean War. Ruth and his friends tramped all over North Carolina’s eastern shores throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, lured back by turkey, waterfowl, collard greens and their own personal barbecue pitmaster, Dave Sampson, Camp Bryan’s personable cook. They fished in the Pamlico Sound and traveled all the way to Ocracoke Island with private guides.
In December 1930, Ruth said: “[There’s] no place like eastern North Carolina, and I’ve hunted most places in the United States.”
He liked the food, too. Babe the hunter had just as prodigious an appetite as Babe the slugger, something he and four friend proved one evening when they ate the 40-pound wild piglet one of them shot.
“He ate as much as several average men,” Sampson said in one news account. “Duck, roast pork, cold pork, asparagus tips on toast, creamed potatoes, baked white potatoes, sweet potatoes, Saratoga (kettle) chips, collard greens, corn, muffins, light bread, toast, prunes, puff prunes, pickled peaches, plum jelly, apple jelly and hot coffee.”
Ruth once ate so many collard greens on a hunting excursion, Stevens, the concessionaire, predicted the slugger might start a North Carolina-based collard greens company when he retired from baseball.
According to camp cook Sampson, Ruth ate them at every meal, including four helpings at dinner, along with multiple corn muffins slathered in butter and sorghum (molasses).
Our State magazine founding publisher Carl Goerch, one of North Carolina’s most prominent participatory journalists, heard about the Bambino’s exploits at Camp Bryan and asked to tag along in the winter of 1931.
To his everlasting surprise, Goerch and Ruth not only shared a room in one of the two rustic camp cabins, they also shared a double bed, an unfilmed precursor to John Candy and Steve Martin in the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Goerch’s take?
“Babe Ruth wears silk pajamas.”
Specifically, Ruth wore flamboyant sleepwear, red with white trim on top and white with red waistband and cuffs on bottom. To compete, Goerch pulled out his flashy green-and-orange silks and the two climbed into bed, a pair of oversized jockeys trying to get a little rest after a busy day of hunting.
“Listen, bo—do you snore?” Ruth asked as he lit a chunky bedtime cigar.
Goerch said he had never been told so.
“I certainly hope you don’t,” Ruth said. “I’ve got a habit of hauling off and hitting folks when they snore.”
Between Ruth's lit cigar and cocked leg, Goerch never fell into a deep enough sleep to snore.
It was such a successful trip that season, Ruth almost lost his New York domestic help. When he returned to his Upper West Side apartment with 31 ducks and two geese, his maid balked, refusing to clean that many ducks. She relented to clean the two geese, but most of the ducks were given away to well-heeled neighbors.
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| Babe Ruth's geese-hunting haul at Camp Bryan. (Photo from ECU digital collection.) |
The next year, Claire went with him to Camp Bryan, but she quickly decided it was too rustic and masculine for her tastes. In subsequent trips, she sent her brothers in her place and always smirked at the gallons of concocted barbecue sauce her husband took with him. (No word if it was Eastern NC-style vinegar sauce or Western NC-style red sauce.)
After years of hunting the eastern part of the state, Ruth returned to his original North Carolina roots in the final days of his playing career, participating in an exhibition game in Fayetteville with the Boston Braves on April 5, 1935.
The beloved but wilting home run champ returned to the same fairgrounds, now renamed Highland Park, for “Babe Ruth Day” to face the Red Terror baseball team from North Carolina State College. As a reported crowd of 6,700 fans excitedly ringed the field waiting for a foul ball or home run, nervous NC State sophomore pitcher Olney Ray “Lefty” Freeman fell behind 3-0 to the legend who was once the most feared hitter in the game.
Freeman followed with three consecutive curveballs that corkscrewed Ruth into the batter’s box and gave Freeman a story to tell for the next 75 years. There was more to the story, however, as athletics director R.R. Sermon and football coach Heartley “Hunk” Anderson carried on a feud for the next five years, with one of the more heated disputes being Anderson accusing Sermon of using an athletics department slush fund to purchase 20 baseballs from a Raleigh sporting goods store to get them autographed by Ruth. The sordid affair was eventually resolved by the state’s General Assembly and Gov. Clyde Huey by restructuring the athletics department, releasing Anderson of his head coaching duties and keeping Sermon as a coach but not as athletics director.
In retirement, Ruth was disillusioned by baseball because neither the Yankees nor any other franchise would hire him as manager. He turned to golf as his primary passion, once claiming to have played 365 rounds in a single year, doubling up on rounds at his St. Albans Country Club in Queens. He also took up bowling up to five times a week, trying to work his way down from nearly 300 pounds.
He still hunted and fished on occasion but never again at Camp Bryan.
As far as newspaper accounts reveal, Babe never returned to the Old North State before his death of esophageal cancer on Aug. 17, 1948, and the North Carolina Collard Company never got off the ground.
