1830s.20
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In GA, Men Played Fives, Schoolboys Played Base and Town Ball
| Salience | Noteworthy |
|---|---|
| Tags | |
| Location | US SouthUS South |
| City/State/Country: | GA, United States |
| Modern Address | |
| Game | Town BallTown Ball |
| Immediacy of Report | |
| Age of Players | Youth, AdultYouth, Adult |
| Holiday | |
| Notables | |
| Text | "Men as well as boys played the competitive games of 'Long Bullets' and 'Fives,' the latter played against a battery built by nailing planks to twenty-foot poles set to make the 'battery' at least fifty feet wide. The school boys played 'base,' 'bull-pen,' 'town ball' and 'shinny' too." |
| Sources | Jessie Pearl Rice, J. L. M. Curry: Southerner, Statesman, and Educator (King's Crown Press, New York, 1949), pages 6-7. Per Thomas L. Altherr, "Chucking the Old Apple: Recent Discoveries of Pre-1840 North American Ball Games," Base Ball, Volume 2, number 1 (Spring 2008), pages 31-32. The full text of the Rice biography is unavailable via Google Books as of 11/15/2008. |
| Warning | |
| Comment | Long-bullets involved distance throwing, often along roadsides. Fives is a team game resembling one-wall hand-ball. "Fives" seems to have been played in Beverly, WVa, around 1860. From Thomas J. Arnold's "Beverly in the Sixties": "For amusement, the boys, young men, and a number of the middle-aged, late in the afternoon, would gather at the Courthouse - to the windows, of which, on the west side, where the Beverly Bank now stands, they had by public contribution placed shutters, and have a game of ball - different from any ballgame I have ever seen. It was called ball-alley, usually played by two or four to each side, the ball made of yarn wound over a small piece of rubber and covered with pig skin. The leader of one side would throw the ball against the side of the Courthouse - his opponents had to knock it back against the wall with open hand, either before it touched the ground or at the first bound from the ground, and hit the wall above the foundation, next play by opponent and so on, alternating. Failure to get the ball against the wall above the foundation scored. It was a good game and gave plenty of exercise. I don't know how many times the Court entered orders prohibiting the playing of ball against the Courthouse but the boys invariably over-ruled the Court - the latter finally quit making orders in disgust." The Beverly Heritage Center has one of these balls. Curry's school was in Lincoln County GA, about 30 miles NW of Augusta. Edit with form to add a comment |
| Query | Team hand-ball? Really? Wasn't it usually a one-on-one game? Edit with form to add a query |
| Source Image | [[Image:|left|thumb]] |
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1830s.20 In GA, Men Played Fives, Schoolboys Played Base and Town Ball"
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