We tend to label baseball players as either saints or sinners, and nowhere can this myth-making phenomenon—with faith and doubt, sin and redemption serving as its backdrop—be better illustrated than with the extraordinary story of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. Born to illiterate sharecropper parents in 1888, he appeared to be destined for a hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth existence of poverty and grueling manual labor. Nothing in his early life belied that presumption, either. After his family moved to Brandon Mill, South Carolina when Joe was only six, he began working in the cotton mill, foregoing school entirely. Life-sapping textile dust and deafening din surrounded him, and his days were filled with drudgery, broken only by the weekly game of baseball played on a dirt field near the mill. It was there, though, that family, friends and co-workers began to glimpse a special talent in young Joe Jackson: the ability to hit and handle a baseball as well as—and perhaps even better than—adult ballplayers throughout the greater Greenville region.

Invited to join the Brandon Mill men’s baseball team at the age of thirteen, Jackson spent several glorious seasons of sun-filled Saturdays on the ball field as his batting prowess prompted admiring spectators to cheer and toss him coins—and impelled baseball managers of rival mill towns to lure him away to play for their teams. From all accounts, Jackson would have been content to remain in South Carolina, working in the mill during the week and playing Saturday ball. His exceptional skill, though, caught the attention of scouts who roamed the region in search of unusual talent.

From Baseball’s All-Time Greatest Hitters: Joe Jackson.