Chronology: 1816 - 1830
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The chronology from 1816 to 1830 (180 entries)
1816.1 Cooperstown NY Bans Downtown Ballplaying Near Future Site of HOF
Tags:
Location:
On June 6, 1816, trustees of the Village of Cooperstown, New York enacted an ordinance: "Be it Ordained That no person shall play at Ball in Second or West Street (now Pioneer and Main Streets), in this village, under a penalty of one dollar, for each and every offence."
Sources:
Otsego Herald, number 1107, June 6, 1816, p. 3. The Herald carried the same notice on June 13, page 3. Per Thomas L. Altherr, “A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball: Baseball and Baseball-Type Games in the Colonial Era, Revolutionary War, and Early American Republic.." Nine, Volume 8, number 2 (2000), p. 15-49. Reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It – see page 245 and ref #75.
Comment:
Note: those streets intersect a half block from the Hall of Fame, right?
Year
1816
1816.2 Worcester MA Ordinance Bans "Frequent and Dangerous" Ball Playing and Hoops"
Tags:
Location:
"[S]uch regulations as will prevent the playing Ball and Hoops in the public Streets . . . a practice so frequent and dangerous, that has occasioned many great and repeated complaints."
Sources:
Worcester, MA Town Records, May 6, 1816; reprinted in Franklin P. Rice, ed., Worcester Town Records, 1801 - 1816, volume X (Worcester Society of Antiquity, 1891), p. 337. Also appears in Henderson, p. 150 [No ref given], and in Thomas L. Altherr, “A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball: Baseball and Baseball-Type Games in the Colonial Era, Revolutionary War, and Early American Republic.." Nine, Volume 8, number 2 (2000), p. 15-49. Reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It – see page 244 and ref #72.
Year
1816
1816.4 "German ballgame" described in Berlin book
Flittner, Christian G., Talisman des Gluckes oder der Selbstlehrer fur alle Karten, Schach, Billard,Ball und Kegel Spiele [Berlin], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 187. This book's small section on ball games carries the Gutsmuths account of das Deutsche Ballspiel the German ballgame.
Query:
Query: Does the game appear to uses bases?
No. Like most forms of longball, there are a home line and a goal line at opposite ends of the field.
Year
1816
1816.5 In "The Year Without a Summer," CT Lads Play Ball on Christmas Day
Tags:
Location:
"My father [Charles Mallory] arrived there [Mystic CT] on Christmas Day and found some of his acquaintances playing ball in what was called Randall's Orchard."
Baughman, James, The Mallorys of Mystic: Six Generations in American Maritime Enterprise [Wesleyan University Press, 1972], page 12. Submitted by John Thorn, 10/19/2004.
Year
1816
1816.7 Lambert's Cricket Rules Published
Lambert, William, Instructions and Rules For Playing the Noble Game of Cricket (1816).
Bateman notes that 300,000 copies of this book were sold by 1865. Bateman, Anthony,"'More Mighty than the Bat, the Pen . . . ;' Culture,, Hegemony, and the Literaturisaton of Cricket," Sport in History, v. 23, 1 (Summer 2003), page 36.
Year
1816
1816.9 Maine Town Outlaws Ball, Quoits, Sledding
Tags:
Location:
"[A]ny person who shall be convicted of sliding down any hill on sleighs, sleds, or boards . . . between Thomas Hinkley's dwelling house & Mr. Vaugh's mill . . . or any who shall play at ball or quoits in any of the streets . . . shall, on conviction, pay a fine of fifty cents for each offence . . . ."
Hallowell [ME] Gazette, December 25, 1816. Hallowell is about 2 miles south of Augusta and 50 miles NE of Portland.
Year
1816
1816.10 Norfolk VA Cricket Club Reported
Game:
Richard Hershberger [emails of 1/28/09 and 2/4/10] reports seeing advertisements in the American Beacon for a Norfolk Cricket Club from 1816 to 1820:
"CRICKET CLUB. A meeting of the Subscribers to this Club, will be held at the Exchange Coffee House, this evening at 6 o'clock, for the purpose of draughting Rules and Regluations for the government."
American Beacon(Norfolk VA), October 25, 1816. Subsequent notices were for playing times.
Note: In The Tented Field, Tom Melville writes that a 1989 book has the Norfolk Club being founded in 1803 in imitation of English customs (page 164, note 10). Patricia Click, in Spirit of the Times (UVa Press, 1989), page 119, cites the October 1, 1803 issue of the "Norfolk and Portsmouth Herald" [likely then the "Norfolk Herald"] in reference to an observation [page 73] about the social makeup of cricket clubs. Query: can we find out what the 1803 paper actually says about cricket, if anything?
Comment:
The New York Clipper, Nov. 20, 1858, reports that a Norfolk Cricket Club has just been formed.
Year
1816
1816c.11 Jane Austen Writes of "Baseball" in Northanger Abbey.
Game:
Age of Players:
Jane Austen mentions "baseball" in her novel Northanger Abbey, published in 1818, after her death.
"Mrs. Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books . . . . But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; so read all such works as heroines must read. . . "
Sources:
Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, (London, 1818), John Murray, Vol. I, p. 7.
Comment:
"Northanger Abbey was published posthumously in 1818, and while most scholars agree the first draft was written in the 1798-99 time period, there is no evidence that Austen's early draft included the baseball reference. It was submitted for publication in 1803 under the name “Susan,” but never went to press. The text was revised between 1816 and 1817, but did not get published until after Austen’s death that summer." (from David Block, 9/16/2020).
Circa
1816
1816.12 Oxfordshire Churchman Urges Base-Ball Fields for Girls
Tags:
Age of Players:
Base-ball, as an outdoor means of recreation for girls, was praised by an English churchwarden in a manuscript history of the Oxfordshire village of Watlington. The writer, John Badcock, made his point despite having it almost swallowed within an unusually convoluted sentence: “It is contrary to reason and common sense to expect that the most sober-minded, if wholly restrained from a game of cricket, or some other amusement--& the other sex from base-ball, or some recreation peculiar to themselves, & exclusively their own, would fill up every leisure hour of a fine summer's evening better, or perhaps so well, in any other way.” Mr. Badcock went on to argue that the lord of the manor, or some other landowner, should take a section of otherwise unusable land and create appropriate playing fields for boys and girls."
Sources:
An Historical & Descriptive Account of Watlington, Oxfordshire, by John Badcock (1816), handwritten manuscript in the collection of the Oxfordshire History Centre, PAR279/9/MS/1, (former reference: MSS.D.D.Par.Wat-lington c.11)
Year
1816
1817.1 Visitor to Philly Tells of Cricket Play There
Game:
"Being a commercial people, they have but few amusements: their summer pastimes are . . . fishing, batching, cricket, quoits, &c; . . . ."
John Palmer, Journal of Travels in the United States of America and in Lower Canada, Etc [London, 1818], page 283. Per Seymour, Harold - Notes in the Seymour Collection at Cornell University, Kroch Library Department of Rare and Manuscript Collections, collection 4809.
Year
1817
1817.2 Riddle Game Cites "Fourteen Boys at Bat and Ball"
Game:
The Gaping, Wide-mouthed, Waddling Frog [London], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 187-188. This chapbook comprises a rhyme resembling the song "the Twelve Days of Christmas, and one verse includes "Fourteen Boys at Bat-and-Ball, Some Short and Some Tall." Block also reports that it contains an illustration of several boys playing trap-ball.
Year
1817
1817.3 Ball Play Banned in New York City's Park, Battery, and Bowling-Green
Tags:
"New York City outlawed ball play in the Park, Battery, and Bowling-Green in 1817." - Tom Altherr.
Sources:
"A law relative to the Park, Battery, and Bowling-Green," in Laws and Ordinances Ordained and Established by the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonality of the City of New York (T. and J. Swords, New York, 1817), page 118. Per Thomas L. Altherr, "A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball," reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It, page 245 and ref #74.
Year
1817
1817.4 In Brunswick ME, Bowdoin College Sets 20-Cent Fine for Ballplaying
Location:
"No student shall, in or near any College building, play at ball, or use any sport or diversion, by which such building may be exposed to injury, on penalty of being fined not exceeding twenty cents, or being suspended if the offence be often repeated."
Sources:
Of Misdemeanors and Criminal Offences, in Laws of Bowdoin College (E. Goodale, Hallowell ME, 1817), page 12. Citation from Thomas L. Altherr, "A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball," reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It, page 239.
Comment:
The college is about 25 miles NE of Portland, and near the Maine coast.
Year
1817
1818.1 Yale Student Reports Cricket on Campus
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Location:
Game:
A student at Yale University reports that cricket and football are played on campus [need cite]. Lester, however, says that he doubts the student saw English cricket, and that, given that the site is CT, it was probably wicket. Lester notes that wicket involved sides of 30 to 35 players, and was played in an alley 75 feet long, and with oversized bats.
Lester, ed., A Century of Philadelphia Cricket [U Penn Press, Philadelphia, 1951], page 7.
Year
1818
1818.2 In Cricket, Well, It's . . ."One Man Out"
Ford notes that "[William] Lambert, the leading professional of the time, banned from playing at Lord's for accepting bribes." Per John Ford, Cricket: A Social History 1700-1835 [David and Charles, 1972], page 21. Ford does not give a citation for this account.
Year
1818
1818.3 "Baseball" at West Point NY?
Game:
"Although playing ball games near the barracks was prohibited, cadets could play 'at football' near Fort Clinton or north of the large boulder neat the site of the present Library. [Benjamin] Latrobe makes curious mention of a game call 'baseball' played in this area. Unfortunately, he did not describe the game. Could it be that cadets in the 1818-1822 period played the game that Abner Doubleday may have modified later to become the present sport?"
Pappas, George S., To The Point: The United States Military Academy 1802 - 1902 [Praeger, Westport Connecticut, 1993], page 145. Note: Pappas evidently does not give a source for the Latrobe statement. I assume that the 1818-1822 dates correspond to Latrobe's time at West Point.
Year
1818
1818.4 Cricket Reported in Louisville KY?
Location:
Game:
"It is not unreasonable to speculate that as the immigrants came down the Ohio River . . . they brought with them the leisure activities hat had already developed in the cities along the Atlantic coast. There are reports of a form of cricket being played in the city as early at 1818."
Sources:
Bailey, Bob, "Beginnings; From Amateur Teams to Disgrace in the National League," [1999], page 1. Bob (email, 1/27/2013), further quotes Dean Sullivan's master's thesis, Ball-oriented Sport in a Southern City: A Study of the Organizational Evolution of Baseball in Louisville (George Mason University): "Ball-oriented sports had been reported in Kentucky as early as 1818, when travelers stumbled upon a primitive game of cricket."
Comment:
Note: The original source of the 1818 reference may have been lost. Bob reports that Dean Sullivan thesis cited Harold Peterson's The Man Who Invented Baseball (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), page 24. However, Peterson gives no source. A dead end?
Query:
Are there other sightings of this 1818 cricket account?
Year
1818
1818c.5 English Immigrants from Surrey See Cricket, Trap Ball in IL
Location:
"[S]ome of the young men were gone to a county court at Palmyra, [but] there was no cricket-match, as was intended, only a game of trap-ball." [1818]
"On the second of October, there was a game of cricket played at Wanborough by the young men of the settlement; this they called keeping Catherine Hill fair, many of the players being from the neighborhood of Godalming and Guildford." [1819]
"There have been [p.295/p.296] several cricket-matches this summer [of 1819], both at Wanborough and Birk Prarie; the Americans seem much pleased at the sight of the game, as it is new to them." [1819]
Sources:
John Woods, Two Years Residence on the Settlement of the English Prairie, in the Illinois Country (Longman & Co., London, 1822), pp. 148 and 295-296.
See also:
Thomas L. Altherr, “Chucking the Old Apple: Recent Discoveries of Pre-1840 North American Ball Games, Base Ball, v. 2, no. 1 (Spring 2008), pages 32-33. Note: Tom's account includes the same quotes, but attributes them to the British lawyer Adlard Welby, and sets them in 1820.
Comment:
The settlement was in modern Edwards County.
Query:
Can we reconcile the conflicts in the two attributions?
Circa
1818
1819.1 British Science Text Uses "Base-ball" Heuristic Example
Tags:
"Emily: In playing at base-ball, I am obliged to use al my strength to give a rapid motion to the ball; and when I have to catch it, I am sure I feel the resistance it makes to being stopped; but if I did not catch it, it would soon stop of itself.
"Mrs B.: Inert matter is as incapable of stopping itself as it is of putting itself in motion. When the ball ceases to more, therefore, it must be stopped by some other cause or power; but as it is one with which your are as yet unacquainted, we cannot at present investigate its powers."
Jane H. Marcet, Conversations on Natural Philosophy [Publisher?, 1819], page? Note: Mendelson, a retired professor at Marquette University, originally located this text, but attributed it to a different book by Mrs. Marcet. David Block found the actual 1819 location. He adds that while it does not precede the Jane Austen use of "base-ball" in Northanger Abbey, "I still consider the quote to be an important indicator that baseball was a popular pastime among English girls during the later 18th and early 19th centuries." David Block posting to 19CBB, 12/12/2006.
Year
1819
1819.2 Scott's Ivanhoe Mentions Stool-ball
Game:
[The Jester speaks] "I came to save my master, and if he will not consent, basta! I can but go away home again. Kind service can not be checked from hand to hand like a shuttle-cock or stool-ball. I'll hang for no man . . . ."
Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe; A Romance (D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1904), page 257. Reference provided by John Thorn 6/11/2007.
Year
1819
1819.3 Herefordshire: "Large Parties" Play Wicket ("Old-Fashioned Cricket")
[Writing of the yeoman of the county:] "notwithstanding their inclination to religion, they meet in large parties upon Sunday afternoons to play foot-ball, wicket (an old-fashioned cricket), or other gymnastics."
Source: "Manners and Customs of Herefordshire," The Gentleman's Magazine, February 1819. Submitted by Richard Hershberger 8/6/2007.
Year
1819
1819.4 In Hartford CT: Legislative Session Associated with Ball-playing?
Tags:
Location:
In a report on the new session of the Connecticut legislature: "In Hartford and the region about the same, those who usually play ball during the day and dance at night on such occasions, did not at this time wholly abandon the ancient uses of Connecticut."
Indiana Central, June 8, 1819, reprinting an article datelined New Haven CT from May 5. Accessed 4/9/09 via subscription search.
Year
1819
1819.5 Irving Surveys Pastimes at Fictional British School; Includes Tip-cat
Tags:
"As to sports and pastimes, the boys are faithfully exercised in all that are on record: quoits, races, prison-bars, tip-cat, trap-ball, bandy-ball, wrestling, leaping, and what-not."
Washington Irving [writing as Geoffrey Crayon], Bracebridge Hall: Or, The Humourists (Putnam's, New York, 1888: written in 1819), page 332. Contributed by Bill Wagner, email o f March 25, 2009. Accessed via 2/3/10 Google Books search (bracebridge tip-cat). The setting is Yorkshire. Note: if cricket, base-ball, rounders, or stoolball were played at the fictional school, it was relegated to "what-not" status.
Year
1819
1819.6 Ball Games Recalled in Southwestern WI
Game:
At the close of the Civil War, a dispute on the actual age Joseph Crele, who claimed to be 139 years old, reached Milwaukee newprint: "Beouchard . . . says he has known Crele for 40 years. In 1819, at Prarie du Chien, Crele was one of the most active participants in the games of base ball, town ball foot races, horse races, &c, and yet at that time, by the claim made for him, he must have been 93 years old."
MilwaukeeDaily Sentinel, April 4, 1865. As posted to the 19CBB listserve by Dennis Pajot, December 11, 2009. Prarie du Chien is about 90 miles west of Madison WI, on the Mississippi River. Note: it is interesting that Beouchard recalls two distinct games [and/or two distinct names of games] being played.
Year
1819
1820.1 Bat/Ball Game Depicted in Children's Amusements
Tags:
Age of Players:
A woodcut illustration of boys playing with a bat and ball appears in a book entitled Children's Amusements . The book contains an illustration of ball playing (page 9) and this text (page 10):
"Playing ball is much practised by school boys and is an excellent exercise to unbend the mind, and restore to the body that elasticity and spring which the close application to sedentary employment in their studies within doors, has a tendency to clog, dull or blunt. But, when practised as is the common method, with a club or bat great care is necessary, as sometimes sad accidents have happened, by its slipping from the hand, or hitting some of their fellows. We would therefore, recommend Fives as a safer play in which the club is not used and which is equally good for exercise. The writer of this, beside other sad hurts which he has been witness of in the use of clubs, knew a youth who had his skull broke badly with one, and it nearly cost him his life."
Sources:
Children's Amusements, [New York, Samuel Wood, 1820], p. 9.
Comment:
David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 188, adds that it is unusual among chapbooks as "more space and detail are devoted to "playing ball" than to cricket, which at the time was a more established game."
While the text does not explicitly mention or show base-running, David Block thinks of this as an early account of English base ball.
Year
1820
1820.2 Round Ball played in Upton, MA
Location:
Henderson, p. 137, attributes this to Holliman, but has no ref to Holliman or to George Stoddard, who reported the game to the Mills Commission. Also quoted at Henderson, p. 150.
Year
1820
1820.3 English Cricketers Play Two-Day Match Again New Yorkers
Tags:
Game:
"The most outstanding cricket matches of the period were those in New York. In fact, the matches of note were played in that city. These contests took place between members of different clubs, and often the sport lasted for two days. Great was the interest if any English player happened to be present to participate in the sport. On June 16, 1820, eleven expert English players matched eleven New Yorkers at Brooklyn, the contest lasting two days." Holliman, Jennie, American Sports (1785 - 1835) [Porcupine Press, Philadelphia, 1975], page 68.
Holliman cites the New York Evening Post June 16, 1820. See also Lester, ed., A Century of Philadelphia Cricket [U Penn, 1951], page 5. Tom Melville, The Tented Field (Bowling Green U, Bowling Green, 1998), page 7, adverts to a similar Englishmen/Americans match, giving it a date of June 1, 1820. He seems to cite The New York Evening Post of June 19, 1820, page 2 for this match, and so June 16 seems like a likelier date.
Year
1820
1820.4 Another English Chapbook Cites Trap-ball
School-boys' Diversions: Describing Many New and Popular Sports [London], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 189. The woodcut shows a trap and bat in the foreground.
Year
1820
1820s.5 Town Ball Recalled in Eastern IL
Location:
Game:
"In the early times, fifty or sixty years ago, when the modern games of croquet and base-ball were unknown, the people used to amuse themselves with marbles, "town-ball" - which was base-ball in a rude state - and other simple pastimes of a like character. Col. Mayo says, the first amusement he remembers in the county was a game of town-ball, on the day of the public sale of lots in Paris, in which many of the "young men of the period engaged."
The History of Edgar County, Illinois (Wm. LeBaron, Chicago, 1879), page 273. Contributed January 31, 2010, by Jeff Kittel. Paris IL is near the Indiana border, and about 80 miles west of Indianapolis.
Decade
1820s
1820c.6 Modified Version of Rounders Played in New England.
Location:
Game:
"About 1820 a somewhat modified version of the old English game of rounders was played on the New England commons, and twenty years later the game had spread and become "town ball." In 1833 the first regularly organized ball club was formed in Philadelphia with the sonorous title of "The Olympic Ball Club of Philadelphia." About 1850 the game gained vogue in New York."
Barbour, Ralph H., The Book of School and College Sports [D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1904] page 143. Per Seymour, Harold - Notes in the Seymour Collection at Cornell University, Kroch Library Department of Rare and Manuscript Collections, collection 4809. Thanks to Mark Aubrey for locating a pdf of the baseball section of this text, June 2007. Barbour does not provide sources for his text.
Circa
1820
1820c.7 Another English Chapbook, Another Engraving of Trap-ball
Juvenile Recreations [London], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 189. Accompanying the Trapball engraving: "Then Master Batt he did decide,/That they might one and all,/Since Rosebud fields were very wide,/Just play Trap bat and ball,/Agreed said all with instant shout,/Then beat the little ball about."
Circa
1820
1820c.8 Another Chapbook - This One Celebrates the Fielder
Juvenile Sports or Youth's Pastimes [London], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 189. The accompanying text: "With bat and trap, the Youth's agre'd/To send the ball abroad with speed,/While eager with his open hands,/To catch him out his playmate stands."
Circa
1820
1820s.9 In Middletown CT, "Wicket" Recalled, but Not Base Ball.
Game:
"[In the summer] ball was the chief amusement, and if the weather permitted (and my impression is that it generally did permit) the open green about the meeting-house and the school-house was constantly occupied by the players, little boys, big boys, and even men (for such we considered the biggest boys who consented to join the game) . . . . These grown-up players usually devoted themselves to a game called 'wicket,' in which the ball was impelled along the ground by a wide, peculiarly-shaped bat, over, under, or through a wicket, made by a slender stick resting on two supports. I never heard of baseball in those days." -- John Howard Redfield
Sources:
Delaney, ed., Life in the Connecticut River Valley 1800 - 1840 from the Recollections of John Howard Redfield (Connecticut River Museum, Essex CT, 1988), p. 35. Per Thomas L. Altherr, "A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball," reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It, pp. 246-247 and ref #86.
Comment:
The description of field play of wicket seems a little odd; as if the stick-handlers's aim was to score by dislodging a wicket, and thus resembling field hockey. Were two separate games conflated in memory?
Decade
1820s
1820s.11 Cricket is Gradually "Cleaned Up;" Club Play Strengthens
Writing of this period, Ford summarizes: "Much single-wicket cricket was played, and wager matches continued, but from the mid 1820s both these features gradually disappeared from the scene as cricket was 'cleaned up.' Of equal importance the game at club level spread and grew strong." John Ford, Cricket: A Social History 1700-1835 [David and Charles, 1972], page 22. Ford does not give citations for this account.
Decade
1820s
1820s.12 Boys Are Attracted to Sports of "Playing Ball or Goal" in Bangor ME
Location:
But a day seems to have elapsed since meeting with our neighboring boys, we took delight in [flying kites and prancing our horses] or engaged ourselves in the more active sports of 'playing ball' or 'goal. -- Albert Ware Paine, telling of boyhood in Bangor Maine.
Sources:
Paine, Albert Ware, "Auto-Biography," reprinted in Lydia Augusta Paine Carter, The Discovery of a Grandmother (Henry H. Carter, Newton MA, 1920), p. 240. Per Thomas L. Altherr, "A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball," reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It; see p. 245 and ref #80.
Query:
Note: Dean Sullivan [7/29/2004] observes that Harold Seymour puts the year of play at Bangor at 1836, citing both pages 198 and 240 of The Discovery of a Grandmother. But Payne was born in 1812, and was not a "boy" in 1836, so this event needs further examination.
Also:This item needs to be reconciled with #1823c.4, below.
Decade
1820s
1820c.13 A Wry View of Cricket Match on Yale Campus
Tags:
Location:
Game:
"On the green and easy slope where those proud columns stand,
In Dorian mood, with academe and temple on each hand,
The foot-ball and the cricket-match upon my vision rise
With all the clouds of classic dust kicked in each other' eyes."
This verse is incorporated without attribution in Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: a History (Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1974), page 214. Kelley's commentary: "[Cricket] may have been a sport at Yale then [in the Colonial period]. The first clear reference to it, owever, is in one stanza of a poem about Yale life in 1818 to 1822." Ibid. Is Yale shielding us from some racy student rhymes? Oh, not to worry: From a rival Ivy League source we see that Lester identifies the poet as William Cromwell - John A. Lester, A Century of Philadelphia Cricket (U of Penn Press, Philadelphia PA, 1951), page7. Note: OK, so who was William Cromwell, and why did he endow so many chairs at Yale?
Circa
1820
1820s.14 New England Lad Recalls Assorted Games, Illicit Fast Day Ballplaying
Game:
Alfred Holbrook was born in 1816. His autobiography, Reminiscences of the Happy Life of a Teacher (Elm Street, Cincinnati, 1885), includes youthful memories that would have occurred in the 1820s.
"The [school-day] plays of those times, more than sixty years ago, were very similar to the plays of the present time. Some of these were "base-ball," in which we chose sides, "one hole cat," "two hole cat," "knock up and catch," Blackman," "snap the whip," skating, sliding down hill, rolling the hoop, marbles, "prisoner's base," "football," mumble the peg," etc. Ibid. page 35. Note: was "knock up and catch" a fungo game, possibly?
"Now, it was both unlawful and wicked to play ball on fast-day, and none of my associates in town were ever known to engage in such unholy enterprises and sinful amusements on fast-days; [p 52/53] but other wicked boys, with whom I had nothing to do, made it their special delight and boast to get together in some quiet, concealed place, and enjoy themselves, more especially because it was a violation of law. Not infrequently, however, they found the constable after them. . . ." "Soon after, this blue law, perhaps the only one in the Connecticut Code, was repealed. Then the boys thought no more of playing on fast-days than on any other." Ibid, pp 52-53.
Decade
1820s
1810s.10 Ballplaying at Bowdoin College
Tags:
Location:
Nehemiah Cleaveland and Alpheus Spring Packard, History of Bowdoin College with Biographical Sketches of the Graduates (Osgood and Company, Boston, 1882). 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), page 32.
"The student of earlier years had not the resources for healthful physical recreation of the present day [1880s]. We had football and baseball, though the latter was much less formal and formidable than the present game" [Page 96]. Note: the precise time referenced here is hard to specify; but the authors graduated in 1813 and 1816, and the context seems to suggest the 1810-1830 period.
Only one of the book's many sketches of alumni, however, mentions ballplaying of any type. The sketch for James Patten, Class of 1823, includes this: "He entered college at the mature age of twenty-four, was a respectable scholar, spoke with a decided brogue, and played ball admirably. . . . When last heard from he was an acting magistrate and a rich old bachelor." [Page 276] The sketch for Longfellow, who in 1824 wrote of constant campus ballplaying [see #1824.1], does not allude to sport.
Circa
1820
1820.16 Union vs. Mechanics - First Mention of Club Cricket?
Game:
On June 19, 1820, the Union and Mechanic Cricket Clubs played two matches in Brooklyn. According to an account [a box score was also provided] in the New York Daily Advertiser of June 21, "this manly exercise . . . excited astonishment in the spectators by their great dexterity . . . . A great number of persons viewed the sport."
Posted to 19CBB by Richard Hershberger, 7/31/2007. Richard noted: "this is the earliest example I know of named cricket clubs, and is not mentioned in Tom Melville's history [The Tented Field.] In am 1/30/2008 email, Richard added that this game was also reported in the New York Columbia of June 19, 1820 as having "all Europeans" on both sides. Note: does the David Sentence book cover this game? Do we know of any earlier club play; for instance, did the Boston Cricket Club [see #1808.2 above] ever take the field in 1808?
Year
1820
1820.17 "The Game of Ball" Banned in Area of Belfast ME
Tags:
"Ballplaying seems to have been extensively practiced in 1820. At the town meeting of that year, it was voted that 'the game of ball, and the pitching of quoits, within the following limits {main Street to the beach, etc] be prohibited.' High Street, at Hopkins Corner, was the favorite battle-ground for ball-players as early as 1805." Joseph Williamson, History of the City of Belfast in the State of Maine, From its First settlement in1770 to 1875 (Loring & Co., Portland, 1877), page 764. Note: Williamson does not provide original sources for the 1820 ordinance or for the 1805 claim.
Year
1820
1820s.18 Syracuse NY Ball Field Remembered as Base Ball Site
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Game:
David Block reports: "In the lengthy 'Editor's Table' section of this classic monthly magazine [The Knickerbocker], the editor described a nostalgic visit that he and two old school chums had taken to the academy that they had attended near Syracuse. 'We went out upon the once-familiar green, as if it were again 'play time', and called by name upon our old companions to come over once more and play 'bass-ball.' But they answered not; they came not! The old forms and faces were gone; the once familiar voices were silent.'"
Sources:
"Editor's Table," The Knickerbocker (S. Hueston, New York, 1850), page 298. Contributed by David Block 2/27/2008.
Comment:
The Editor, Lewis Gaylord Clark, was born in 1810, and attended the Onondaga Academy. He was thus apparently recalling ball-playing from sometime in the 1820s. Onondaga Academy was, evidently, about 3 miles SW of downtown Syracuse.
Query:
Can we get better data on Clark's age while at the Academy?
Decade
1820s
1820s.19 Ball-Playing in Ontario
Location:
"Contrary to the once commonly held belief that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839, a form of the game existed in Oxford County [ON] during the early decades of the nineteenth century that used a square playing field with four bases and eleven players a side." Nancy B. Bouchier, For the Love of the Game: Amateur Sport in Small-Town Ontario, 1838-1895 (McGill-Queens University Press, 2003), page 100. Note: Dating this item to the 1820's is a best guess [we are asking the author for input], based on additional evidence from N. Bouchier and R. Barney, "A Critical Evaluation of a Source on Early Ontario Baseball: The Reminiscence of Adam E. Ford," Journal of Sport History, Volume 15 number 1 (Spring 1988). Players remembered as attending the 1838 event included older "greyheaded" men who reflected back on earlier play - one of whom was on the local assessment roll in 1812.
Decade
1820s
1820s.20 Horace Greeley Lacks the Knack, Fears Getting Whacked
Tags:
Age of Players:
"Ball was a common diversion in Vermont while I lived there; yet I never became proficient at it, probably for want of time and practice. To catch a flying ball, propelled by a muscular arm straight at my nose, and coming so swiftly that I could scarcely see it, was a feat requiring a celerity of action, an electric sympathy of eye and brain and hand . . . . Call it a knack, if you will; it was quite beyond my powers of acquisition. 'Practice makes perfect.' I certainly needed the practice, though I am not sure that any amount of it would have made me a perfect ball-player."
Sources:
Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (J. B. Ford, New York, 1869), page 117. 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), page 30.
This book was accessed 11/15/2008 via Google Books search "greeley recollections owen."
Comment:
Tom Altherr places the time as the early 1820s. Greeley, born in New Hampshire in 1811, was apprenticed a Poultney VT printer in about 1825.
Poultney VT is on the New York border, about 70 miles NNW of Albany NY. Greeley does not mention the games of wicket or round ball or base ball.
Decade
1820s
1820s.21 College Prez Was a Klutz at Ball and Cricket
Game:
Age of Players:
"I could not jump the length of my leg nor run as fast as a kitten . . . . At ball and cricket I 'followed in the chase not like a hound that hunts, but one that fills up the cry.'"
-- John Howard Raymond, later President of Vassar College.
Sources:
Harriet Raymond Lloyd, ed., Life and Letters of John Howard Raymond, Late President of Vassar College (Ford, Howard and Hulbert, New York, 1881), page 38. 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), page 34. Accessed 11/16/2008 via Google Books search for <john howard raymond>. Raymond, born in New York in 1814, summered as a boy in Norwalk CT.
Decade
1820s
1820s.22 MA Boy Played One Old Cat, Base Ball in Early Childhood
Game:
"In my early boyhood I was permitted to run at large in the [Williamstown MA] street and over broad acres, playing 'one old cat,' and base ball (no scientific games or balls as hard as a white oak boulder in those days) excepted when pressed into service to ride the horse to plough out the corn and potatoes."
-- Keyes Danforth
Sources:
Keyes Danforth, Boyhood Reminiscences: Pictures of New England in the Olden Times in Williamstown (Gazlay Brothers, New York, 1895), page 12. 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), page 38. The book was accessed 11/16/2008 via Google Books search <pictures of new>."
Comment:
Danforth, born in 1822, became a judge. Williamstown MA is in the NW corner of the commonwealth, and lies about 35 miles E of Albany NY.
Decade
1820s
1820s.23 Town Ball Came to Central IL in the 1820s.
Location:
Game:
"This game [bullpen, the local favorite] was, in time, abandoned for a game called "town ball;" the present base ball being town ball reduced to a science."
The History of Menard and Mason Counties, Illinois (Baskin and Company, Chicago, 1879), page 252. Contributed by Jeff Kittel, January 31, 2010. Jeff notes that the author was in this passage describing educational conditions in the early 1820s. The two counties are just north of Springfield IL.
Decade
1820s
1820c.24 Waterbury CT Jaws Drop as Baptist Deacon Takes the Field
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Game:
Age of Players:
"after the 'raising' of this building, at which, as was customary on such occasions, there was a large gathering of people who came to render voluntary assistance, the assembled company adjourned to the adjacent meadow (now owned by Charles Frost) for a game of baseball, and that certain excellent old ladies were much scandalized that prominent Baptists, among them Deacon Porter, should show on such an occasion so much levity as to take part in the game."
Joseph Anderson, ed., The Town and City of Waterbury, Connecticut, from the Aboriginal Period to the Year 1895, Volume III (Price and Lee, New Haven CT, 1896), page 673n. Accessed 2/3/10 via Google Books search (Waterbury aboriginal III).
Circa
1820
1820s.25 In Western MA, Election Day Saw Town vs. Town Wicket Matches
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Game:
"'Election Day' was, however, the universal holiday, and the prevailed amongst the farmers that corn planting must be finished by that day for its enjoyment. It was a day of general hilarity, with no prescribed forms of observation, though ball playing was ordinarily included in the exercises, and frequently the inhabitants of adjacent towns were pitted against one another in the game of wicket. Wrestling, too, was a common amusement on that day, each town having its champions."
Charles J. Taylor, History of Great Barrington (Bryan and Co., Great Barrington MA, 1882), page 375. Accessed 2/3/10 via Google Books search (taylor great barrington). Note: this passage is not clearly set in time; "1820s" is a guess, but 1810s or 1830s is also a possibility.
Decade
1820s
1820c.26 Octogenarian Recalls Frequency of Play, How Balls Were Made in NY
Tags:
"If a base-ball were required, the boy of 1816 founded it with a bit of cork, or, if he were singularly fortunate, with some shreds of india-rubber; then it was wound with yarn from a ravelled stocking, and some feminine member of his family covered it with patches of a soiled glove." - Charles Haswell
(Haswell also reflected on Easter observances of the era. They were subdued, save for the coloring of eggs by some schoolboys. "For a few weeks during the periods of Easter and Paas, the cracking of eggs by boys supplanted marbles, kite-flying, and base-ball.")
Sources:
Charles H. Haswell, Reminiscences of An Octogenarian of the City of New York (1816 to 1860) (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1897), page 77. Accessed 2/2/2010 via Google Books search <haswell octogenarian>. See also Thomas L. Altherr, “A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball: Baseball and Baseball-Type Games in the Colonial Era, Revolutionary War, and Early American Republic.." Nine, Volume 8, number 2 (2000), p. 15-49. Reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It – see page 245 and ref #81.
Circa
1820
1820c.27 Base-ball Recalled at New York's Battery Grounds
Tags:
Location:
Game:
Age of Players:
"Of those [students] of Columbia, I write advisedly - they were not members of a boat club, base-ball, or foot-ball team. On Saturday afternoons, in the fall of the year, a few students would meet in the 'hollow' on the Battery, and play an irregular game of football . . . As this 'hollow' was the locale of base-ball, "marbles," etc., and as it has long since been obliterated, and in its existence was the favorite resort of schoolboys and all others living in the lower part of the city, it is worthy of record"
Haswell recalls the Battery grounds as "very nearly the entire area bounded by Whitehall and State Streets, the sea wall line, and a line about two hundred feet to the west; it was of an uniform grade, fully five feet below that of the street, it was nearly uniform in depth, and as regular in its boundary as a dish."
Sources:
Charles Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian of the City of New York (1816 to 1860) (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1896), pages 81-82. Citation supplied by John Thorn, email of 2/3/2008. Accessed 2/4/10 via Google Books search <octogenarian 1816>.
Discussed in John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game (Simon and Shuster, 2011), p. 62. For a 2009 discussion of available knowledge about US baseball history prior to the Knickerbockers, see John Thorn, "Origins of the New York Game," Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, vol. 3, no. 21 (Fall 2009), pp. 105-125.
Comment:
Haswell was 87 years old when this account was published in 1896.
Circa
1820
1820c.28 English Village Green Had Cricket, Bass-Ball
A "rambling" railway passenger reflects as he passes through the English countryside: "The rambler sees a pretty white spire peeping out of the woodland before him . . . . The road leads to Stoke Green. Alas! We may lament for what is no more, and the name is a mockery. There was a village green some twenty years ago . . . . and the cheerful spot where the noise of cricket and bass-ball once gladdened the ear on a summer eve is now silent."
Ah, the good old days. "Railway Rambles," Penny Magazine, Oct 23, 1841, page 412. Accessed 2/11/10 via Google Books search ("railway rambles" penny 1841). The location is evidently about 20 mi W of London. Source: Tom Altherr, "Some Findings on Bass Ball," Originals, February 2010, page 2.
Circa
1820
1820.29 Base ball Seen as "Old-fashioned" Activity For English Girls
Tags:
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Age of Players:
"In 1820, another girl-oriented book, entitled Early Education, mentions 'base ball' among a footnoted list of appropriate 'old-fashioned' amusements that also includes 'hunt the slipper' and 'my lady's toilette."
Sources:
E. Appleton, Early Education (2nd Edition, 1821), page 384, cited in David Block, John Newberry Publishes A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, and With it Our First Glimpse of the game of English Baseball,Base Ball, volume 5, number 1 (Spring 2011), page 34.
Query:
Does the context of this passage clearly imply that girls played base ball?
Is the author suggesting that base ball was considered an "old-fashioned" pastime in 1821?
Where was Early Education published?
Year
1820
1820c.30 Early African American baseball
Tags:
Game:
Excerpt of interview with "A Colored Resident. Henry Rosecranse Columbus, Jr."
"The bosses used to come and bet on the horses, and they had a great deal of fun. After the races they used to play ball for egg nog.”
Reporter—“Was it base ball as now played?”
Mr. Rosecranse—“Something like it, only the ball wasn’t near so hard, and we used to have much more fun playing.”
Sources:
Kingston (NY) Daily Freeman, August 19, 1881, "A Colored Resident. Henry Rosecranse Columbus, Jr. Some Incidents in the Life of an Old Resident of Kingston."
Recounted at http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2012/12/26/did-african-american-slaves-play-baseball/
Circa
1820
1820s.31 "Many Different Kinds of Ball" Remembered
Location:
Game:
Age of Players:
In a charming 1867 volume, a father delivered an extended disquisition about ball games in his youth in New England. That was definitely before 1840 and more likely in the 1820s, or the 1830s at the latest. (The book had an 1860 copyright registration, so the author penned it in that year or in the 1850s). The detail of this recounting merits full excerpting:
“I think the boys used to play ball more when I was young than they do now. It was a great game at that time, not only among the boys, but with grown-up people. I know that playing ball is getting into fashion again, but I don’t think it is as common even yet as it used to be. We had, I remember, a good many different kinds of ball. There was “barn-ball,” when there were only two boys to play, one to throw the ball against the barn and make it bound back, and the other to strike at it with his club. Then there was “two-hold-cat,” when there were four boys, two to be in and knock, and two to throw. Then there was “base-ball,” when there were a good many to play. In base-ball we chose sides, and we might have as many as we pleased on each side -- five or fifty, or any other number.
“Then there was “wicket-ball,” as we called it in the part of the country where I lived. In this game, two sticks, some five or six feet long, were laid on some little blocks near the ground, and the ball, which was a large one, was rolled on the ground, and the one that rolled it tried to knock off this stick, while the one that was in and had the bat or club, was to strike the ball and not let it knock the stick off. If the stick was struck off, then the one knocker was “out.” Or if he hit the ball and raised it in the air, and any one on the other side caught it, he was “out.” I find that ball-playing changes some, and is different in different parts of the country, but it was a very wide-awake sport, and there was no game in which I took more delight. On ‘Lection-day, as it was called, of which I have spoken before, all the boys and young men, and even men who were older, thought they must play ball. On town-meeting days and training days, this game was almost always going on."
Sources:
Winnie and Walter’s Talks with Their Father about Old Times Boston: J.E. Tilton and Company, 1867[1860 copyright]), pp. 54-56.
Comment:
Tom’s Comments:
Allowing for the somewhat “in-my-day” tone, there are a few interesting items in this passage. Note the unusual spelling of two old cat or two o’cat. Was there some action of holding the ball, holding the bat, holding the runner that inspired the use of the word “hold?” The initial claim that ball play was more popular in his youth is at first a head-scratcher given the surge of popularity of baseball in the1850s and 1860s.
But what if he reckoning was accurate, if only for his part of New England? That would be interesting evidence for baseball historians trying to measure the trajectory of the game’s development. Did what he called “base-ball” more resemble town-ball, or did the word “base-ball” have a wider currency that we have suspected? The description of wicket-ball seems slightly askew from other accounts--regional variation or memory lapse? Last, the civic holidays that ball play accompanied were not always in clement seasons. Training days tended to be during milder or hot weather, but town meeting and election days often occurred in March and November. The author’s points about the importance of ball play may be stronger than at first glance, if the players did not let the prospect of foul weather discourage their zeal.
Bruce's comment: The author, Increase Niles Tarbox (yes, that was his name!) was born in East Windsor, CT in 1815, and was raised there and in Vernon, CT. After graduating from Yale, he became a pastor in Framingham, MA.
Decade
1820s
1820s.33 Harvard Man: "We had Baseball"
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"Boating[,] which now prevails so largely in Harvard, had not yet come, but we had baseball and football in their season."
-- James Freeman Clarke, Harvard Class of 1829
Sources:
E. Hale, ed., James Freman Clarke: Autobiography, Diary, and Correspondence (Boston, 1891), page 44.
Decade
1820s
1820s.34 Impromptu Ballplaying Recalled at Transylvania University
Tags:
Age of Players:
"Inter-collegiate or intramural sports in the college were almost nonexistent. There were periods of relaxation in the afternoons, and impromptu ballgames, or ice-skating, racing, walking, etc., but there was no gymnasium, and no organized or supervised physical education."
-- Albea Godbold, author, 1944
Sources:
John D. Wright, Transylvania: Tutor to the West (Lexington KY, 1975), p. 95. This material is footnoted to Albea Godbold, The Church College in the South (Durham, 1944), page 102 [not inspected by Protoball as of 2020]. 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), page 33.
Comment:
Transylvania University was the first college located west of the Allegheny Mountains, and the first in Kentucky. One prominent graduate was Jefferson Davis [insert your joke here.]
This section of the book is evidently an account of life at the university in the 1820s.
Decade
1820s
1821.1 New York Book Has Bat and Ball Poem
Little Ditties for Little Children [New York, Samuel Wood and Sons], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 190. "Come on little Charley, come with me and play/And yonder is Billy, I'll give him a call,/ Do you take the bat, and I'll carry the ball . . . "
Year
1821
1821.2 Cricket Not New in South Carolina
Location:
Game:
Age of Players:
"The members of the old cricket club are requested to attend a meeting of [sic?] the Carolina Coffee House tomorrow evening."
Sources:
Charleston Southern Patriot, January 23, 1821, per Holliman, American Sport 1785 - 1835, page 68.
Year
1821
1821.3 Schenectady NY Bans "Playing of Ball Against the Building"
Tags:
The Schenectady City Council banned "playing of Ball against the Building or in the area fronting the Building called City Hall and belonging to this corporation . . . under penalty of Fifty cents for each and every offence . . . ." Note: citation needed. Submitted by David Pietrusza via John Thorn, 3/6/2005.
Year
1821
1821.4 A Three-Times-and-Out Rule in ME Cricket?
Game:
"'Three times and out' is a maxim of juvenile players at cricket."
Maine Gazette, November 20, 1821; submitted by Lee Thomas Oxford, 9/2/2007. Note: What can this reported rule possibly mean? Were beginning cricketers given three chances to hit the bowled ball in ME? John Thorn, email of 2/3/2008, points out that three swings was sometimes an out in wicket, and that the Gazette may have erred.
Year
1821
1821.5 NY Mansion Converted to Venue Suitable for Base, Cricket, Trap-Ball
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Age of Players:
In May and June 1821, an ad ran in some NY papers announcing that the Mount Vernon mansion was now open as Kensington House. It could accommodate dinners and tea parties and clubs. What's more, later versions of the ad said: "The grounds of Kensington House are spacious and well adapted to the playing of the noble game of cricket, base, trap-ball, quoits and other amusements; and all the apparatus necessary for the above games will be furnished to clubs and parties."
Richard Hershberger posted to 19CBB on Kensington House on 10/7/2007, having seen the ad in the June 9, 1821 New YorkGazette and General Advertiser. Richard suggested that "in this context "base is almost certainly baseball, not prisoner's base." John Thorn [email of 3/1/2008] later found a May 22, 1821 Kensington ad in the Evening Post that did not mention sports, and ads starting on June 2 that did.
Richard points out that the ad's solicitation to "clubs and parties" may indicate that some local groups were forming to play the mentioned games long before the first base ball clubs are known to have played.
Sources:
June 9, 1821 New York Gazette and General Advertiser
See also Richard Hershberger, "New York Mansion Converted -- An Early Sighting of Base Ball Clubs?," Base Ball Journal, Volume 5, number 1 (Special Issue on Origins), pages 58-60.
Query:
Have we found any further indications that 1820-era establishments may have served to host regular base ball clubs?
Year
1821
1821.6 Fifty-cent Fine in New Bedford for Those Who Play at Ball
Tags:
Location:
"Any person, who shall, after the first day of July next, play at ball, or fly a kite, or run down a hill upon a sled, or play any other sport which may incommode peacable citizens and passengers in any [illegible: street?] of that part of town commonly called the Village of Bedford" faces a fifty-cent penalty.
"By-Laws for the Town of New-Bedford," New Bedford [MA] Mercury, August 13, 1821. Accessed by subscription search May 5, 2009.
Year
1821
1821.7 1821 Etching Shows Wicket Game in Progress
Location:
Game:
This engraving was done by John Cheney in 1821 at the age of 20. It was originally engraved on a fragment of an old copper kettle. It is reported that he was living in Hartford at the time.
It is one of the earliest known depictions of wicket.
The etching depicts six players playing wicket. The long, low wickets are shown and two runners, prominently carrying large bats, are crossing between them as two fielders appear to pursue a large ball in flight. Two wicketkeepers stand behind their wickets.
Sources:
Biographical background from "Memoir of John Cheney," by Edna Dow Cheney (Lee and Shepherd, Boston, 1889), page 10.
For an account of Baseball Historian John Thorn's 2013 rediscovery and pursuit of this engraving, go to http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2013/02/05/the-oldest-wicket-game-newly-found/
Comment:
An interesting aspect of this drawing is that there appear to be four defensive players and only two offensive players . . . unless the two seated gentlemen in topcoats have left them on while waiting to bat. One might speculate that the wicketkeepers are permanently on defense and the other pairs alternate between offense and defense when outs are made. Another possibility is that all players rotate after each out, as was later seen in scrub forms of base ball.
Also note the relative lack of open area beyond the wickets. Perhaps, as in single-wicket cricket, running was permitted only for balls hit forward from the wicket.
Query:
We welcome other interpretations of this image.
Year
1821
1821.8 English Essayist Praises Youth Playing Bass-ball and Cricket
Tags:
"There is nothing to me more delightful than to see the young working people amusing themselves after the labours of the day. A village green, with its girls and boys playing at bass-ball, and its grown-up lads at cricket, is one of those English sights which I hope no false refinement will ever banish from among us."
Sources:
A Game at Skittles," (author identified as "Editor K."), published within a larger work entitled The Plain Englishman, Vol. II, London, 1821, Hatchard and Son, p. 267
Comment:
Note: This entry was formerly listed for 1844 from prior sources.
The location of the village play in not given.
Year
1821
1821.9 NYC "Ball Club" To Shift Next Meeting, at Broadway Hotel
Age of Players:
Sources:
John Thorn, email of 1/18/2023. The clip shown below is from the Post, 9/7/1821.
Comment:
John Thorn adds, 1/18/2023: "Some years ago George Thompson created a stir with his find (Note: see Protoball entry 1823.1) of a baseball game played at Jones' Retreat in NYC in April 1823. (Prior to Jones, The Retreat had been named for previous proprietors, first William Neilson and then W.B. Heyer.) Here, from the Post of June 5, 1821:
'THE RETREAT -- NEW HOTEL. � The subscriber begs leave to inform all those who wish to encourage him with their patronage, that the elegant house at the corner of Art street and Broadway, opposite Vauxhall, is now open for their reception. Gentlemen may be accommodated with Board by the week or month. He keeps a constant supply of Ice Cream, and parties may be accommodated with Coffee, Tea and Relishes of various descriptions. HEYER.'
N. B. The Retreat is opposite Vauxhall Garden. The proprietor has thought proper, with the advice of his friends, to issue a limited number of Tickets of Admission to this House, on the day of Mr. Guille's [balloon] Ascension, at twenty-five cents each, to be had in refreshments, such as Ice Cream, Cake, Punch, Lemonade, &c. &c."
Query:
[] Were there other pastimes in this era known as "ball clubs?" For Bowling? Wicket? Cricket? Other?
Year
1821
1821.99 "Ball Club" To Shift Next Meeting, at Broadway NYC Hotel
Age of Players:
Sources: John Thorn, email of 1/18/2023.
The clip shown below is from the Post, 9/7/1821.
Comment: John Thorn adds:
"Some years ago George Thompson created a stir (see Protoball entry 1823.1) with his find of a baseball game played at Jones' Retreat in NYC in April 1823. (Prior to Jones, The Retreat had been named for previous proprietors, first William Neilson and then W.B. Heyer.) Here, from the Post of June 5, 1821:
"THE RETREAT -- NEW HOTEL. � The subscriber begs leave to inform all those who wish to encourage him with their patronage, that the elegant house at the corner of Art street and Broadway, opposite Vauxhall, is now open for their reception. Gentlemen may be accommodated with Board by the week or month. He keeps a constant supply of Ice Cream, and parties may be accommodated with Coffee, Tea and Relishes of various descriptions. HEYER.
N. B. The Retreat is opposite Vauxhall Garden. The proprietor has thought proper, with the advice of his friends, to issue a limited number of Tickets of Admission to this House, on the day of Mr. Guille's [balloon] Ascension, at twenty-five cents each, to be had in refreshments, such as Ice Cream, Cake, Punch, Lemonade, &c. &c."
Query: [] Were there other pastimes in this era known as "ball clubs?" Bowling? Wicket? Cricket? Other?
Year
1821
1822.1 Round Ball Played in Worcester
Location:
"Timothy Taft, who is living in Worcester, October 1897, played Round Ball in 1822. The game was no new thing then. I think Mr. Stoddard is right about the game being played directly after the close of the Revolutionary War [see entry #1780c.4]. At any rate, if members of your Commission question the antiquity of the game (Round Ball) we have Mr. Taft still living who played it 83 years ago, and we have corroborative testimony that it was played long before that time."
Letter from Henry Sargent, Worcester MA, to Mills Commission, June 10, 1905. Henderson, on page 149, quotes the Commission's press release as referring to a Timothy Tait, which seems likely a reference to Taft. In this letter Sargent also reports that in Stoddard's opinion, "the game of Round Ball or Base ball is one and the same thing, and that it dates back before 1845."
Note: do we have that Mills Commission release that Henderson cites?
Year
1822
1822.2 Round-Arm Bowling Disallowed at Lord's Cricket Ground
Ford reports that "John Willes of Kent is "no-balled" for "throwing" at Lord's for round-arm bowling. Nevertheless William Lillywhite James Broadbridge and others continue this practice. John Ford, Cricket: A Social History 1700-1835 [David and Charles, 1972], page 21. Ford does not give a citation for this account.
Year
1822
1822.3 Cricket Clubs, "Other Ball Clubs" Welcomed at Philadelphia PA Facility
Location:
Game:
In an advertisement about an outdoor recreation establishment run by John Carter Jr. on the western bank of the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia PA is included the sentence "Gentlemen are informed that the grounds are so disposed as to afford sufficient room and accommodation for quoit and cricket and other ball clubs." It doesn't say what these "other ball clubs" are playing. Saturday Evening Post, June 22, 1822, Vol. 1, Issue 47, page 003. Submitted by Bill Wagner 1/24/2007.
Year
1822
1822.4 Trap Ball Advertised at Inn
Location:
"TRAP BALL. This entertaining game and pleasing exercise may be enjoyed every Monday afternoon, at the Traveller's Rest, in Broad Street, between Chestnut and Walnut. Traps, Bats, and Balls may be had for select parties or promiscuous companies at any time. Refreshments of the first quality at the Bar."
Saturday Evening Post [running ad, summer 1822]. Provided by Richard Hershberger, email of June 26, 2007. The location is Philadelphia PA.
Comment:
To be exact, from May 25 to July 27, 1822, in this weekly. [ba]
Year
1822
1822.5 Ball-playing Disallowed in Front of Hobart College Residence
Location:
"The rules for Geneva Hall in 1822 are still preserved. The residents were not allowed to cut or saw firewood, or play ball or quoits, in front of the building."
Warren Hunting Smith, Hobart and William Smith; the History of Two Colleges (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva NY, 1972. Provided by Priscilla Astifan, email of 2/4/2008.
Year
1822
1822.6 Eastport bans "bat and ball"
Game:
The Eastport Sentinel, May 26, 1830 reprints the town's 1822 By-Laws, which ban playing "bat and ball" under penalty of a 50 cent fine.
Sources:
The Eastport Sentinel, May 26, 1830
Year
1822
1822.7 New Bedford Bans "Playing at Ball"
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Game:
Age of Players:
An 1822 bylaw levied a fine to anyone who would “play at ball, fly a kite or run down hill upon a sled… in any street of that part of the town commonly called the Village of New-Bedford”. Thomas Rodman wrote about being “initiated into the mysteries of Foot-ball, Base and every game boys pursue” when he was a student at Friends Academy in the mid-1830s.
Year
1822
1823.1 National Advocate Reports "Base Ball" Game in NYC
Tags:
Location:
Game:
Age of Players:
The National Advocate of April 25, 1823, page 2, column 4, states: "I was last Saturday much pleased in witnessing a company of active young men playing the manly and athletic game of 'base ball' at the (Jones') Retreat in Broadway [on the west side of Broadway between what now is Washington Place and Eighth Street]. I am informed they are an organized association, and that a very interesting game will be played on Saturday next at the above place, to commence at half past 3 o'clock, P.M. Any person fond of witnessing this game may avail himself of seeing it played with consummate skill and wonderful dexterity.... It is surprising, and to be regretted that the young men of our city do not engage more in this manual sport; it is innocent amusement, and healthy exercise, attended with but little expense, and has no demoralizing tendency."
(Full text.)
Sources:
National Advocate, April 25, 1823, page 2, column 4. This find is discussed by its modern discoverer George Thompson, in George A. Thompson, Jr., "New York Baseball, 1823," The National Pastime 2001], pp 6 - 8.
Year
1823
1823.2 Base-ball Listed Among Games Played in Suffolk
9Moor, E., Suffolk Words and Phrases [Woodbridge, England], p. 238. Per RH ref 123 and Chadwick 1867. The listed games played in Suffolk include cricket, base-ball, kit-cat, Bandy-wicket, and nine holes. Note:: But not trap-ball? Not rounders? Moor muses: "It is not unpleasing thus to see at a glance such a variety of recreations tending to excite innocent gaiety among our young people. He is no friend to his fellow creatures who desire to curtail them; on the contrary I hold him a benefactor to his county who introduce a new sport among us."
Year
1823
1823.3 Don't Play Ball Inside the House!
Good Examples for Boys [New York, Mahlon Day], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 190. A boy breaks a hand mirror with indoor ball play. With illustration.
Year
1823
1823c.4 Young Man Recalls "More Active Sports of 'Playing Ball' or 'Goal.'"
Location:
"Really time flies fast. Tis but a day it seems since we three were boys . . . . But a day seems to have elapsed since meeting with our neighboring boys, we . . . engaged ourselves in the more active sorts of "playing ball" or "goal."
Sources:
Carter, L. A., The Discovery of a Grandmother [H. H. Carter, Newtonville MA, 1920], pp 239-240. Per Seymour, Harold - Notes in the Seymour Collection at Cornell University, Kroch Library Department of Rare and Manuscript Collections, collection 4809. From this note, the excerpts appear to be from a journal kept in 1835-1836 by Albert Ware Paine, born 1813.
Note: This item needs to be reconciled with #1820s.12 above.
Circa
1823
1823.5 Providence RI Bans "Playing Ball" in the Streets
Tags:
Location:
"The Town of Providence have passed a law against playing ball in any of their public streets; the fine is $2. Why is not the law enforced in this Town? Newport Mercury, April 26, 1823, Vol. 62, Issue 3185, page 2. Submitted by John Thorn 1/24/2007.
In August 2007, Craig Waff [email of 8/17/2007] located the actual ordinance:
"Whereas, from the practice of playing ball in the streets of the town, great inconvenience is suffered by the inhabitants and others: . . . no person shall be permitted to play at any game of ball in any of the publick streets or highways within the limits of this town."
Rhode-Island American and General Advertiser Volume 15, Number 60 (April 25, 1823), page 4, and Number 62 (May 2, 1823), page 4.
Year
1823
1823.6 Students Play Ball Game at Progressive School in Northampton MA
Age of Players:
[A, B] In their recollections during the 1880s, John Murray Forbes and George Cheyne Shattuck describe playing ball during the years 1823 to 1828 at the Round Hill School in Northampton MA. This progressive school for young boys reflected the goals of its co-founders, Joseph Green Cogswell and George Bancroft; in addition to building a gymnasium, the first US school to do so, Round Hill was one of the very first schools to incorporate physical education into its formal curriculum.
--
[C] In 1825 Carl Beck, Latin and gymnastic instructor at Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, had translated F. L. Jahn’s Deutche Turnkunst (1816). Jahn had mentored the Turnerbund, a movement devoted to gymnastics. According to Beck’s original preface, “[T]hose who take an interest in the cause would be pleased to acquaint themselves with the exertions of Gutsmuths . . . years before Jahn came forward.” (Gutsmuths’ book on games provided David Block with the 1796 rules and diagram of a game called “Englische baseball,” in his 2005 Baseball before We Knew It.)
Round Hill School is renowned as the first school in the nation to include physical education in its curriculum. Translating Jahn, Beck wrote that in “games to be played without the precinct of the gymnasium, playing ball is very much to be commended.” Tellingly, where Beck inserted “playing ball,” Jahn himself recommended “the German ball game” (also in Gutsmuths and Block). Beck, however, changed the “German ball game” to “ball-playing” to suit his American audience. Also, given that the boys of Round Hill came from across the nation, Ball acknowledged regional variations: “The many variations in different parts, are altogether unessential and a matter of choice.” Ball-playing, Beck wrote, “unites various exercises: throwing, striking, running and catching.”
Sources:
[A] Forbes was writing his recollections in 1884, as reported in Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Sarah Forbes Hughes, editor [Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1899], vol. 1, page 43.
[B] Shattuck is quoted in Edward M. Hartwell, Physical Training in American Colleges and Universities [GPO, 1886], page 22.
[C] Primary source: Carl Beck, Treatise on Gymnastics Taken Chiefly from the German of F. L. Jahn (Northampton, Mass., 1828).
Warning:
Query:
Are any reports available on the rules of the game as played at Round Hill?
Beck didn't give the game a particular name?
Year
1823
1823.7 Ditty: "You Take the Bat, and I'll carry the Ball"
"Now bright is the morning, how fair is the day,/Come on little Charlie, come with me and play/And yonder is Billy, I'll give him a call,/Do you take the bat, and I'll carry the ball./But we'll make it a rule to be friendly and clever/Even if we are beat, we'll be pleasant as ever,/'Tis foolish and wicked to quarrel in play,/So if any one's angry, we'll send him away."
Little Ditties for Little Children (Samuel Wood and Sons, New York, 1823), page 9. An illustration shows two players and one watcher. One player is using a spoon-shaped bat. No ball or trap is visible. From the Origins file at the Giamatti Center at the HOF.
Year
1823
1823c.9 Kentucky Abolitionist Recalls Playing Base-ball
Tags:
Location:
Age of Players:
"I had ever been devoted to athletic sports - riding on horseback . . . playing base-ball, bandy, foot-ball and all that - so I had confidence in my prowess."
-- Cassius Marcellus Clay, on his outdoor activities at St. Joseph College in Kentucky in about 1823.
Clay (b. 1810) attended Madison Seminary, St. Joseph's College, Bardstown, KY around 1823.
Sources:
Cassius Marcellus Clay, The Life of Cassius Marcellus Clay; Memoirs, Writings and Speeches, Volume 1 (Brennan and Co., Cincinnati, 1886), page 35. 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), page 31.
Raised in Nelson Counrty
Comment:
Clay's book, which seems to make no other reference to ball-playing, was accessed 11/15/2008 via a Google Books search for <life of cassius>.
Circa
1823
1823.10 Hagerstown bans ball playing at the Court House
Tags:
Game:
Age of Players:
The town of Hagerstown, bothered by "boys ... playing at ball against the Court-House," made this a punishable trespass.
Sources:
Hagerstown Herald, Dec. 9, 1823
Year
1823
1824.1 Longfellow on Life at Bowdoin College: "Ball, Ball, Ball"
Age of Players:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, then a student at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, writes: "This has been a very sickly term in college. However, within the last week, the government seeing that something must be done to induce the students to exercise, recommended a game of ball now and then; which communicated such an impulse to our limbs and joints, that there is nothing now heard of, in our leisure hours, but ball, ball, ball. . . . [S]ince, there has been a thorough-going reformation from inactivity and turpitude."
Sources:
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, letter to his father Stephen Longfellow, April 11, 1824, in Samuel Longfellow, ed., Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with Extracts from His Journals and Correspondence [Ticknor and Company, Boston 1886],volume 1, p. 51. Per Seymour, Harold - Notes in the Seymour Collection at Cornell University, Kroch Library Department of Rare and Manuscript Collections, collection 4809. Also cited in Thomas L. Altherr, “There is Nothing Now Heard of, in Our Leisure Hours, But Ball, Ball, Ball,” The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture 1999 (McFarland, 2000), p. 187.
Reprinted in Andrew Hilen, ed., Henry Wadsworth Longefellow, the Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, vol. 1 1814 - 1836 [Harvard University Press, 1966], page 87. Submitted by George Thompson, 7/31/2005.
Year
1824
1824.2 Children's Book Calls Cricket "Noblest Game of All," and Trap-ball is Pleasing Too
Juvenile Pastimes or Sports for the Four Seasons [London, Dean and Munday], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 191. For cricket: "Cricket's the noblest game of all,/ That can be play'd with bat and ball." For trap-ball: "This is a pleasing, healthy sport,/ To which most boys with glee resort."
Year
1824
1824c.3 English Writing Cites Base-ball as Girls'; Pastime, Limns Cricket Match
Tags:
Game:
Age of Players:
[A] "Better than playing with her doll, better even than base-ball, or sliding or romping, does she like to creep of an evening to her father's knee."
[B]Bateman states that Our Village, a collection of short stories and vignettes, which was initially serialized in The Lady's Magazine in the late 1820's, contains the first comprehensive prose description of a cricket match."
Sources:
[A] Mitford, Mary Russell, Our Village [London, R. Gilbert], per David Block, Baseball before We Knew It, page 191. Block notes that this was published in New York in 1828, and Tom Altherr [email of April 2, 2009] adds that Philadelphia editions appeared in 1835 and 1841.
[B] Bateman, Anthony,"'More Mighty than the Bat, the Pen . . . ;' Culture,, Hegemony, and the Literaturisaton of Cricket," Sport in History, v. 23, 1 (Summer 2003), page 34.
Warning:
While this chron entry is dated circa 1824, the installation of sections of Our Village may have begun in 1826.
Comment:
"Our Village" was published over time in four volumes beginning in 1824. The second volume, published in 1826, includes the short story “The Tenants of Beechgrove” which contains this baseball quote on page 28. A year later, 1827, the story appeared in the Ladies’ Pocket Magazine, Vol. I, page 157. -- David Block, 9/25/2020
Circa
1824
1824.4 Fondly Remembering the First Ballplaying Richie Allen
Tags:
Stanzas to the Memory of Richard Allen; The Atheneum; or, Spirit of the English Magazines (1817-1833), Boston, August 16, 1824, vol. 1, Issue 10, page 379.
"What! School-fellow, art gone? . . .
Thou wert the blithest lad, that ever/ Haunted a wood or fish'd a river,/ Or from the neighbour's wall/ Filch'd the gold apricot, to eat/ In darkness, as a pillow treat, / Or 'urged the flying ball!'"/ Supreme at taw! At prisoner's base/ The gallant greyhound of the chase!/ Matchless at hoop! and quick,/ Quick as a squirrel at a tree . . .
Year
1824
1824.5 Ballplaying Now Condoned at Dartmouth College
Tags:
Location:
During 1824 the village of Hanover NH authorized "the playing at ball or any game in which ball is used on the public common in front of Dartmouth College, set apart by the Trustees thereof among the purposes for a playground for their students." John K. Lord, A History of the Town of Hanover New Hampshire [Dartmouth Press, Hanover NH, 1928], page 23. Submitted by Scott Meacham 8/21/2006.
Year
1824
1824.6 Oliver Wendell Holmes Recalls Schoolboy Baseball and Phillips Academy in MA
Tags:
Game:
Age of Players:
"[At Phillips] Bodily exercise was not, however, entirely superseded by spiritual exercises, and a rudimentary form of base-ball and the heroic sport of foot-ball were followed with some spirit."
Sources:
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "Cinders from the Ashes," The Works of Oliver Wendel Holmes Volume 8 (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1892), page 251. He went on to recollect visiting the school in 1867, when he "sauntered until we came to a broken field where there was quarrying and digging going on, our old base-ball ground." Ibid, page 255.
This essay originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly Volume 23 (January 1869). page 120.
Comment:
Note: see item #1829c.1 below for Holmes' Harvard ballplaying.
Query:
Are we sure we haven't got Holmes pere et fils confused? OWH Sr (1809-1894), the poet and novelist, attended Andover and Harvard in the 1820s. OWH Jr (1841-1935) attended Harvard in the 1850s, served in the Civil War and became a justice of the US Supreme Court.--WCH
Year
1824
1824.7 Bat and Ball, Cricket are Sunday Afternoon Pastimes
Game:
"on Sunday, after afternoon service, the young people joined in foot-ball and hurling, bat and ball, or cricket."
Sources:
London Anti-Gallican Monitor, April 11, 1824
Query:
Does the context of this excerpt reveal anything further about the region, circumstance, or participants in this ball-playing?
Year
1824
1825c.1 Thurlow Weed Recalls Baseball in Rochester NY
Tags:
Location:
Age of Players:
"A baseball club, numbering nearly fifty members, met every afternoon during the ball playing season. Though the members of the club embraced persons between eighteen and forty, it attracted the young and old. The ball ground, containing some eight or ten acres, known as Mumford's meadow . . . ." -- Thurlow Weed
[Weed goes on to list prominent local professional people, including doctors and lawyers, among the players.]
The experience is also represented in a 1947 novel, Grandfather Stories. "[The game] was clearly baseball, not town ball, as the old man described the positioning of the fielders and mentioned that it took three outs to retire the batting side." -- Tom Altherr.
Sources:
Weed, Thurlow, Life of Thurlow Weed [Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1883], volume 1, p. 203. Per Robert Henderson ref #159.
Samuel Hopkins Adams, Grandfather Stories (Random House, 1955 -- orig pub'd 1947), 146-149.
Query:
Did Weed advert to 3-out half innings, or did Adams?
Circa
1825
1825.2 Bass-Ball Challenge Issued in New York State
Tags:
Game:
The following notice appears in the July 13, 1825 edition of the Delaware Gazette: "The undersigned, all residents of the new town of Hamden, with the exception of Asa Howland, who has recently removed into Delhi, challenge an equal number of persons of any town in the County of Delaware, to meet them at any time at the house of Edward B. Chace, in said town, to play the game of Bass-Ball, for the sum of one dollar each per game . . . ."
Sources:
Delaware Gazette, July 12, 1825, reprinted in Dean A. Sullivan, Compiler and Editor, Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825 - 1908 [University of Nebraska Press, 1995], pp. 1 - 2.
Comment:
Note: George Thompson has conducted research on the backgrounds of the listed players: personal communications, 11/3/2003. He found a range of players' ages from 19 to the mid-30's. It is held in PBall file #1825.2.
Year
1825
1825.3 Writer Follows Strutt's Theory That Club-ball Was the Source Game
Aspin, J., Picture of the Manners, Customs, Sports and Pastimes of the Inhabitants of England [London, J. Harris] per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 191. Aspin's book reappeared in 1835 as Ancient Customs, Sports, Pastimes of the English, with the same material on ball play. Note: Are later games mentioned or listed by Aspin?
Year
1825
1825c.4 John Oliver Plays Base Ball in Baltimore
Location:
"John W. Oliver recalls having baseball in Baltimore, Maryland. His family moved from England when he was three. "He remembers very distinctly having played the game of Base Ball when a boy. He states that his earliest recollection of the playing of the game was when he was about ten years of age, and at that time the game was played in this manner: The batter held the ball in one hand and a flat stick in the other, tossed the ball into the air and hit on the return, and then ran to either one, two, or three bases depending on the number of boys playing the game. If the ball was caught on the fly or the batter hit with the ball while running the bases, he was out. These bases, so called, at that time, were either stones or pieces of sod was removed [sic], or bare places where grass was scraped off. He remembers seeing the game played frequently while an apprentice boy, but always in this manner, never with a pitcher or a catcher, but sometimes with sides, which were chosen somewhat in the manner in which they are now chosen by boys; that is, by one catching a bat in his hand and another placing his hand on top, alternating in this manner until the last one had hold of the end of the bat, which he swung around his head. I never saw the game played with stakes or poles used for bases instead of stones or sods. Never heard of a game of Rounders. One Old Cat, Two Old Cat, Three Old Cat have seen played, but never have taken part in it myself."
Full text of Mills Commission summary of information from John W. Oliver, Editor, Yonkers Statesman, under date of September 26, 1905. From the Giamatti Center at Cooperstown. Note: we wish we could ascertain what were Oliver's own words, given the artlessness of this summary. Oliver was about 90 when debriefed in 1905.
Comment:
See also 1825.15, 1827.9, 1835.3
Circa
1825
1825.5 Base Ball Called One of the College Sports as Early as 1825.
Tags:
"What we know as Base Ball was played in its primitive form as far back as the beginning of the last [19th] century, and many of the oldest inhabitants remember seeing it played. It was one of the college sports as early as 1825."
Francis C. Richter, Richter's History and Records of Base Ball; The American Nation's Chief Sport [McFarland, 2005], page 4. Originally published in 1914. Cited as Richter, History and Records , page 12, by Harold Seymour - Notes in the Seymour Collection at Cornell University, Kroch Library Department of Rare and Manuscript Collections, collection 4809. Seymour notes that Richter was editor of Sporting Life in 1906.
Year
1825
1825c.6 Cricket Played at Southern Outings
Location:
Game:
In the South, "cricket was played even at the end of house raisings and trainings. The game was played along with quoits and other games of skill and strength. Parties were formed to go on fishing trips and picnics, and during the outing, cricket was one of the games played." Jennie Holliman, American Sports 1785 - 1835 (Porcupine Press, Philadelphia, 1975), page 68.
Holliman here cites The American Farmer, vol. 8, no 143 (1825), which John Thorn found online [email of 2/9/2008], and which does not make a strong case for cricket's ubiquity. This piece suggests that an ideal way to spend a Saturday near Baltimore is to have a fishing contest until dinnertime, and "after dinner pitch quoits, or play at cricket, or bowl at nine-pins." "Sporting Olio," American Farmer, Containing Original Essays and Selections on Rural Economics, July 22, 1825, page 143.
Circa
1825
1825c.7 American Chapbook Reprises Couplets on Cricket, Trap-ball
Game:
Sports and Pastimes for Children [Baltimore, F. Lucas, Jr.], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 191. The verse for cricket and trap-ball is taken from the English Juvenile Pastimes [1824, above].
Circa
1825
1825.8 Wicket Bat Reportedly Long [and Still?] Held in Deerfield MA Collection
Game:
The Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association reported that, as of 1908, it retained a wicket bat dating from 1825-30. Submitted by John Thorn, 1/13/2007. Note: John is trying to ascertain whether the bat remains in the collection.
Year
1825
1825.9 Ballplaying Planned on Saturdays in Hartford CT
Location:
"BALL PLAYING: There will be Ball playing in Washington Street, a few rods South of the College, every Saturday afternoon, through the season, the weather permitting, Bats Balls and Refreshments provided by Emmons Rudge." American Mercury [Hartford CT] , April 12, 1825. Submitted by John Thorn, 9/29/2006.
Year
1825
1825.10 Cricket Reaches Tasmania
References to Tasmanian cricket date back to 1825, the year the colony gained its independence from New South Wales, but there is no detailed mention of matches before 1832."
Egan, Jack, The Story of Cricket in Australia (ABC Books, 1987), page 16
Year
1825
1825.11 Cricket Prohibited On or Near English Highways, We Mean It
Tags:
Among many column-inches listing things that should never happen on or near a highway, we find: "or fire or let off or throw any squib, rocket serpent, or other firework whatsoever, within eighty feet of the center of such road; or shall bait or run for the purpose of baiting any bull, or play [p. 167/168] at football, tennis [an indoor game then, as far as we know LMc] , fives, cricket, or any other game or games upon such road, or on the side or sides thereof, or in any exposed situation near thereto, to the annoyance of any passenger or passengers . . . " Wm. Robinson, The Magistrate's Pocket-Book; or, and Epitome of the Duties and Practice of a Justice of the Peace (London, 1825), section 87, pp 167-168. Provided by John Thorn, 2/8/2008.
Year
1825
1825c.12 Rochester Senior: "How the Game of Ball Was Played"
Location:
Writing in 1866, a man ("W") in Rochester NY described the game he had played "forty years since." That game featured balls made from raveled woolen stockings and covered by a shoemaker, a softer ball - "not as hard as a brick" than the NY ball, no fixed team size, soft tosses from the pitcher who took no run-up, "tick" hitting, the bound rule, plugging, a mix of flat and round bats. He suggests organizing a throw-back game to show 1860's youth "what grey heads can do."
"W," "The Game of Base Ball in the Olden Time," Rochester Evening Express (July 10, 1866), page 3, column 4. Provided by Priscilla Astifan, 2006. To read the full text, go here. Note: the writer does not say where he played these games, mentioning that he moved to Rochester three years before.
Circa
1825
1825.13 1906 Baseball History Sees Rounders in US, 1825-1840
Game:
"'Rounders,' from which modern baseball is generally believed to have derived its origin, was a very simple game - so simple, in fact, that girls could play it. It was played with a ball and bats and was practiced in this country as early as 1825 [p. 437] . . . Rounders was popular between 1825 and 1840, but meantime there had been many other forms of ball playing. [.p 438]"
George V. Tuohey, "The Story of Baseball," The Scrap Book (Munsey, New York, 1906), pp. 437ff. Caution: Tuohey gives no evidentiary support for this observation, and the Protoball sub-chronology [http://retrosheet.org/Protoball/Sub.Rounders.htm] for rounders shows no firm evidence that a game then called rounders was popular in the US.
Year
1825
1825c.14 Future Ohio Governor is "Best Ball Player at the College"
John Brough was the Governor of Ohio from 1864 to 1865. At the age of 11 his father died and he took on work as a type-setter. In 1825 he "entered the Ohio University, at Athens, where he pursued a scientific course, with the addition of Latin . . . . He was fleet of foot and the best ball player at college."
Whitelaw Reid, Ohio in the War: Her Statesmen, Generals and Soldiers Volume 1 (Moore Wilstach and Baldwin, Cincinnati, 1868), page 1022. Accessed 2/5/10 via Google Books search ("ohio in the war"). Athens OH is in Eastern Ohio near the WV border, and about 70 miles SE of Columbus.
Circa
1825
1825.15 Base Ball in Baltimore
Game:
Age of Players:
Sporting Life 1905-11-25 includes "Played Base Ball In 1825," a Nov 17
report from Yonkers NY. Yonkers Statesman editor John W. Oliver claims
clear recall of "how the game was played from 1825 to 1835 in Baltimore.
He said it was known as base ball as far back as 1825, and that the
players ran bases just as they do now."
I suppose the latter refers to a square run counterclockwise with the
first base line 45 degrees off the path home to the pitcher --ie, the
"diamond" run counterclockwise.
Sources:
19cbb post by Paul Wendt, Apr. 18, 2005
Comment:
In 1825 the City of Baltimore banned "play and bandy or at ball" on Sunday. See Baltimore Commercial, April 9, 1925. See also Baltimore Gazette, Nov. 20, 1827. This partially confirms John W. Oliver's story.
Year
1825
1826.1 Christian Visitor to Indiana Commune Unimpressed with Sunday Ballplaying There
"Monday [June] 26th. I breakfasted at this place. In Harmony there are about 900 souls. They make no pretensions to religion . . . . I shall only add, that Sunday is a holiday, they have two public balls a week, one every Tuesday and every Saturday night, that the men played ball all yesterday afternoon, that their cornfields and vineyards are overrun with weeds, their school children are half of the time out of school."
"Extract from the Correspondence of a Young Gentleman Traveling in he Western States," American Advocate, September 9, 1826. The location was New Harmony IN, a settlement organized by the utopian thinker Robert Owen in 1824. New Harmony is near the southern tip of IN, and is on the Wabash River, about 130 miles east of St. Louis and about 120 miles east of Louisville KY. Accessed by subscription search May 20, 2009.
Year
1826
1826.2 Ballplaying Said Documented in Troy Michigan on Nation's 50th
Game:
"Troy, a small hamlet in Southwestern Michigan, has documentary proof that a game was played there thirteen years before 1839 . . . . [T]he lineups of the two teams contesting in the game at Troy in 1826 are contained n a history of Oakland County."
The Sporting News, November 14, 1940. Posted by Tim Wiles on the 19CBB listserve on November 18, 2009. Tim enlisted Peter Morris in an effort to find confirmatory details. The result:
Under the heading "A fourth of July in 1826 [the Nation's 50th birthday, and the day that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died] is an account of the festivities, including a fusillade, patriotic readings, a dinner of pork and beans and bread and pumpkin pies, and "[f]ollowing this was the burning of more powder [cannon volleys?], and a game of base-ball, in which [19 names listed] and other participated." Peter determined that two of the players had sons who played for the Franklin Club in later years.
Year
1826
1826.3 Base Ball Associated with Boston Gymnasium Proposal?
Age of Players:
[See image, below]
Messrs. William Sullivan and John G. Coffin have petitioned the Councils of Boston for the use of a piece of public ground, for two years, for the establishment of a Gymnastic School–a measure of doubtful propriety, we apprehend. If a boy wants to play; let him play but do not spoil the fun by dictating the modus operandi–a game of base ball, or foot ball, is worth a dozen gymnassiums [sic], where the eye of surveillance is to check the flow of animal spirits.
Sources:
United States Gazette (Philadelphia) March 28, 1826
Comment:
Note that this find comes five years before town ball is seen in Philadelphia.
From Bruce Allardice, email of 6/9/2021:
"In the year 1823, Dr. John G. Coffin, established a journal in Boston entitled, "The Boston Medical Intelligencer, devoted to the cause of physical education, and to the means of preventing and curing diseases." The motto in the title page was as follows :- "The best part of the medical art, is the avoiding of pain." This journal some five or six years afterward, became the "Boston Medical and Surgical Journal," "
Dr. John G. Coffin (1769-1828), married. Eliza Rice.
This is undoubtedly one of the petitioners for the gymnasium.
The mentioned William Sullivan is probably Judge William Sullivan (1774-1839), a prominent local politician and lawyer.
Query:
Does this item suggest that 'base ball' was a term used in Philadelphia in 1826? In Boston in 1826?
Was the Gymnasium actually established in Boston? Was ballplaying among its activities? Was gymnastics seen in the Commons in the early years?
Isn't this ref a very early appearance of the term foot ball in the US? Can we learn what rules may have applied?
Year
1826
1827.1 Brown U Student Reports "Play at Ball"
Tags:
Location:
Age of Players:
Brown College (Providence, RI) student Williams Latham notes in his diary:
On March 22: "We had a great play at ball today noon."
On April 9: "We this morning . . . have been playing ball, But I have never received so much pleasure from it here as I have in Bridgewater. They do not have more than 6 or 7 on a side, so that a great deal of time is spent in running after the ball, neither do they throw so fair ball, They are afraid the fellow in the middle will hit it with his bat-stick."
Sources:
"The Diary of Williams Latham, 1823 - 1827," quoted in W. C. Bronson, The History of Brown University 1764 - 1914 (Providence, Brown University, 1914), p. 245. Per Henderson, Bat, Ball, and Bishop (Rockport Press, 1947), p.147, ref # 101. See also Thomas L. Altherr, “A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball: Baseball and Baseball-Type Games in the Colonial Era, Revolutionary War, and Early American Republic.." Nine, Volume 8, number 2 (2000), p. 15-49. Reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It – see page 240; Cited in Peterson, "The Man Who Invented Baseball," p. 10-12 (1939)
Query:
"The fellow in the middle?" Does this suggest the lack of foul ground?
What/where is Bridgewater? Was Bridgewater MA Latham's home town, maybe?
Year
1827
1827.2 Story Places Baseball in Rochester NY
Tags:
Location:
Age of Players:
A story, evidently set in 1880 in Rochester, involves three boys who convince their grandfather to attend a Rochester-Buffalo game. The grandfather contrasts the game to that which he had played in 1827.
He describes intramural play among the 50 members of a local club, with teams of 12 to 15 players per side, a three-out-side-out rule, plugging, a bound rule, and strict knuckles-below-knees pitching. He also recalls attributes that we do not see elsewhere in descriptions of early ballplaying: a requirement that each baseman keep a foot on his base until the ball is hit, a seven-run homer when the ball went into a sumac thicket and the runners re-circled the bases, coin-flips to provide "arbitrament" for disputed plays, and the team with the fewest runs in an inning being replaced by a third team for the next inning ["three-old-cat gone crazy," says one of the boys]. The grandfather's reflection does not comment on the use of stakes instead of bases, the name used for the old game, the relative size or weight of the ball, or the lack of foul ground - in fact he says that outs could be made on fouls.
Sources:
Samuel Hopkins Adams, "Baseball in Mumford's Pasture Lot," Grandfather Stories (Random House, New York, 1947), pp. 143 - 156. Full text is unavailable via Google Books as of 12/4/2008.
Comment:
Adams' use of a frame-within-a-frame device is interesting to baseball history buffs, but the authenticity of the recollected game is hard to judge in a work of fiction. Mumford's lot was in fact an early Rochester ballplaying venue, and Thurlow Weed (see entry #1825c.1) wrote of club play in that period. Priscilla Astifan has been looking into Adams' expertise on early Rochester baseball. See #1828c.3 for another reference to Adams' interest in baseball about a decade before the modern game evolved in New York City.
Query:
We welcome input on the essential nature of this story. Fiction? Fictionalized memoir? Historical novel?
Year
1827
1827.3 First Oxford-Cambridge Cricket Match Held
Age of Players:
Per Stephen Green, interview at Lords Cricket Ground, 2006. Also noted in John Ford, Cricket: A Social History 1700-1835 [David and Charles, 1972], page 21. Ford does not give a citation for this account.
Query:
Was inter-college competition common in other English sports at this time? Rowing, maybe?
Year
1827
1827.4 Poisoned Ball Listed in French Manual of Games
Location:
Game:
Celnart, Elizabeth, Manuel complet des jeux de societe (Complete manual of social games) [Paris, Roret], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 192. The material on "la balle empoisonee" is reported as "virtually identical" to that of the 1810 Les Jeux des juenes garcons, above at 1810.
Query:
Does this manual cover other safe-haven games? Other batting games? Other games with plugging?
Year
1827
1827.5 Science of Trap Construction Revealed
Paris, J. A., Philosophy in Sport Made Science in Earnest, Being an Attempt to Illustrate the First Principles of Natural Philosophy by the Aid of the Popular Toys and Sports of Youth (London, Longman), 3 volumes. Per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 192. Block notes that detailed illustrations of the trap are included, but mentions no other games.
Year
1827
1827.6 A Tip for Good Health: Cricket for the Blokes, Bass-ball for the Lasses
Tags:
Location:
Age of Players:
"With the same intention [that is children's health], the games of cricket, prison bars, foot ball, &c. will be useful, as children grow up, and are strong enough to endure such exercise.
"With regard to girls, these amusements may be advantageously supplanted by bass-ball, battledore and shuttlecock, and similar and playful pursuits."
William Newnham, The Principles of Physical, Intellectual, Moral, and Religious Education, Volume 1 (London, 1827), page 123. Uncovered and provided by Mark Aubrey, email of 1/30/2008.
Year
1827
1827.7 NY Boy Celebrates "Releasement" from School By Playing Ball
Location:
Age of Players:
"In consequence of a dismission from school this afternoon, I play at ball . . . and perhaps you will say that I might have been better employed . . . If so are your thoughts, I can tell you, that you are much mistaken. If you have ever been confined to a study where every exertion of intellect was required, for any length of time, you must, upon releasement therefrom, have felt the pleasure of relaxation."
-- Nathaniel Moore, Student at Clinton Academy, East Hampton, Long Island.
Sources:
Nathaniel Moore, "Diaries 1827-1828," Manuscript Division, New York Public Library, 106-L-1, May 26, 1827. 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), page 36 and ref #45.
Year
1827
1827.8 Lithograph Shows Ballplaying in City Hall Park, NY
Tags:
John Thorn (emails of 9/1/2009) has unearthed an engraving of City Hall Park that depicts a ball game in progress in the distance. My best squint shows me pitcher, batsman, a close-in catcher, two distant fielders and three spectators (two seated). Old cat? Single-wicket cricket? Scrub base ball?
The lithograph, titled "The Park, 1827," is published as the frontispiece Valentine's Manual for the Corporation of the City of New York (1855). For a wee image, try a Google Web search of <"the park, 1827/McSpedon">.
Comment:
We welcome other interpretations of the depicted ballgame.
Year
1827
1827.9 Baltimore MD Bans Ballplaying on Sundays and within City Limits
Tags:
Location:
"CITY OF BALTIMORE. 36. AN ORDINANCE to restrain evil practices therein mentioned. . . .[Sec. 3] it shall not be lawful for any person to play at bandy or ball, to fly a kite or throw a stone or any other missile in . . . any street, lane, or alley opened for public use within the limits of the city." Section 7 covers Sabbath play, again including ball, and adding "pitching quoits or money." The penalty was $1.00. The ordinance is dated March 2, 1827.
Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, March 13, 1827, page 3. Posted to the 19CBB listserve November 2009 by George Thompson. Note:
Comment:
One type of ballplaying that was banned was that described by young John Oliver at entry #1825c.4, above.
Year
1827
1827.10 "Base-ball, a nonsuch for (Girls') eyes and arms"
Tags:
Game:
Age of Players:
From the London Literary Gazette of March 24, 1827, in a negative review of a book on calisthenic exercises for ladies by one Signor Voarino:
[noting that the author is a foreigner] "Perhaps he was not aware...that we had diversions like these just mentioned, and many others of the same kind--such, for example (for our critical knowledge is limited,) as hunt the slipper, which gives dexterity of hand and ham; leap frog, which strengthens the back (only occasionally indulged in, we believe, by merry girls;) romps, which quicken all the faculties; tig, a rare game for universal corporeal agility; base-ball, a nonsuch for eyes and arms; ladies' toilet, for vivacity and apprehension; spinning the plate, for neatness and rapidity; grass-hopping (alias shu-cock,) for improving the physical powers; puss in the corner, and snap-tongs, for muscularity and fearlessness;--all these, and hundreds more, not so well known nor so much practised in London, perhaps, as in the county, we have had for ages..."
Sources:
London Literary Gazette, March 24, 1827, per 19cbb post by Richard Hershberger, Oct. 26, 2010
Year
1827
1828.1 Boy's Own Book [London] Describes "Rounders," Stoolball, Feeder
Tags:
Game:
Age of Players:
The Boy's Own Book is published in London and contains a set of rules for "stool-ball," [p. 26], "trap, bat, and ball," [p. 27], "northern-spell," [p. 28], "rounders," [p.28], and "feeder" [p. 29]. The rounders entry states: "this is a favorite game with bat and ball, especially in the west of England." The entry for feeder, in its entirety: "This game is played with three bases only, and a player takes the place of feeder, who remains so until he puts one of the other players out, by catching his ball or striking him while running from base to base, as at Rounders; the one who is put out taking the place of feeder to the others, and thus the game goes on. There are no sides at this game." The entry for northern spell describes a game without running or fielding, in which the object is to hit the ball farthest - "this pastime possesses but little variety, and is by no means so amusing to the bystanders as Trapball."
Altherr uses a reference to an 1829 US version: The Boy's Own Book [Munroe and Francis, Boston, 1829], pp. 18-19, per Thomas L. Altherr, "A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball," reprinted in David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, ref # 65. David Block, page 192-193, describes the wide popularity of this text in England and the US, running through many editions through the 1880s, and also identifies this book as Henderson's key evidence in his refutation of the Doubleday theory of baseball's origin 11 years later.
Sources:
Clarke, W., Boy's Own Book (London, Vizetelly Branston), 1828: second edition. This book is reportedly still available (Appleton Books, 1996), according to Tim Wiles at the Giamatti Research Library. Note:
Tom Altherr uses a reference to an 1829 US version: The Boy's Own Book (Munroe and Francis, Boston, 1829), pp. 18-19, per Thomas L. Altherr, "A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball," reprinted in David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, (Nebraska, 2005), pp. 229ff.
.
Comment:
[] David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 192-193, describes the wide popularity of this text in England and the US, running through many editions through the 1880s, and also identifies this book as Robert Henderson's key evidence in his refutation of the Doubleday theory of baseball's origins 11 years later.
[] In 2021 Protoball asked David Block why the Boy's Own Book had not mentioned English base ball among ballplaying versions as late as 1828:
"English Baseball was omitted because it was an under-the-radar game even back then. It was largely unknown in London and thus largely unknown to Clark and, apparently, to anyone else who may have helped him write The Boy’s Own Book."
(Email from David Block, 9/21/21)
Year
1828
1828.2 Portland Newspaper Reports Boys Playing at "Bat-and-Ball."
Game:
Age of Players:
"A Portland newspaper referred to boys playing at "bat and ball" - Tom Altherr
Sources:
Anderson, Will, Was Baseball Really Invented in Maine? (private printing, Portland, 1992), p. 1. Per Thomas L. Altherr, "A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball," reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It, see page 244 and ref #71.
Comment:
The fine announced in 1805.2 must not have persisted?
Query:
Can we find the source, and some text, for this?
Year
1828
1828c.3 Upstate Author Carried Now-Lost 1828 Clipping on Base Ball in Rochester
Tags:
Location:
Game:
Age of Players:
[A] "Your article on baseball's origins reminded me of an evening spent in Cooperstown with the author Samuel Hopkins Adams more than 30 years ago. Over a drink we discussed briefly the folk tale about the "invention" of baseball in this village in 1839.
"Even then we knew that the attribution to Abner Doubleday was a myth. Sam Adams capped the discussion by pulling from his wallet a clipping culled from a Rochester newspaper dated 1828 that described in some detail the baseball game that had been played that week in Rochester."
[B] Adams' biography also notes the author's doubts about the Doubleday theory: asked in 1955 about his novel Grandfather Stories, which places early baseball in Rochester in 1827 [sic], he retorted "'I am perfectly willing to concede that Cooperstown is the home of the ice cream soda, the movies and the atom bomb, and that General Doubleday wrote Shakespeare. But," and he then read a newspaper account of the [1828? 1830?] Rochester game."
[C] "Will Irwin, a baseball historian, tells us he was informed by Samuel Hopkins of a paragraph in an 1830 newspaper which notes that a dance was to be held by the Rochester Baseball Club."
Sources:
[A] Letter from Frederick L. Rath, Jr, to the Editor of the New York Times, October 5, 1990.
[B] Oneonta Star, July 9. 1965, citing Samuel V. Kennedy, Samuel Hopkins Adams and the Business of Writing (Syracuse University Press, 1999), page 284.
[C] Bill Beeny, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, March 17, 1965.
Comment:
Priscilla Astifan has looked hard for such an article, and it resists finding. She suspects the article appeared in a newspaper whose contents were not preserved.
Circa
1828
1828c.4 NH Man Recalls Boyhood Habit of Playing Ball
Location:
Cyrus Bradley, born in 1818 in rural NH, refers in 1835 to his boyhood habit of playing ball.
"Journal of Cyrus P. Bradley," Ohio Archeological and Historical Society, Volume XV [1906], page 210. Per Seymour, Harold - Notes in the Seymour Collection at Cornell University, Kroch Library Department of Rare and Manuscript Collections, collection 4809.
Circa
1828
1828c.5 Vermont Schoolboy Recalls Playing Goal, With Elm Trees as Goals
Location:
"The big boys had great times playing goal, and other noisy and running games, and the elm trees by our yard were the goals . . . "
History of Samuel Paine, Jr., 1778-1861 and His Wife Pamela (Chase) Paine, 1780-1856, of Randolph VT and Their Ancestors and Descendants, compiled and edited by their grandson Albert Prescott Paine, 1923. Per Seymour, Harold - Notes in the Seymour Collection at Cornell University, Kroch Library Department of Rare and Manuscript Collections, collection 4809.
Circa
1828
1828.6 Cricket Allows Species of Round-Arm Bowling
Says Ford: "Compromise reached permitting round-arm bowling to the level of the elbow." John Ford, Cricket: A Social History 1700-1835 [David and Charles, 1972], page 21. Ford does not give a citation for this account.
Year
1828
1828.7 Ballplaying in Pawtucket RI
Location:
[Note: Need to recover lost attachment submitted by John Thorn, 7/23/2005 see 1828 folder.]
Year
1828
1828.8 View of NYC Ballplayers "A Worse Menace Than Traffic"
Tags:
"Let anyone visit Washington Parade, and he will find large groups of men and boys playing ball and filling the air with shouts and yells."
Evening Posteditorial no date given. This quote comes from Berger, Meyer, "In the Ball Park Every Man's a King," New YorkTimes, April 14, 1935. Submitted by John Thorn, fall 2005.
Year
1828
1825.16 Mitford Story Centers on Cricket, Touches on Juvenile Baseball
Tags:
Age of Players:
"Then comes a sun burnt gipsy of six . . . . her longing eyes fixed on a game of baseball at the corner of the green till she reaches the cottage door . . . . So the world wags until ten; then the little damsel gets admission to the charity school, her thoughts now fixed on button-holes and spelling-books those ensigns of promotion; despising dirt and baseball, and all their joys."
Sources:
From "Jack Hatch," taken from the Village Sketches of Mary Russell Mitford, The Albion: A Journal of News, Politics, and Literature September 9 1828, volume 7, page 65.
Warning:
This item was originally dated 1828, and adjusted to 1825 in 2020. For some details, see Supplemental Text below.
Comment:
Submitted by Bill Wagner 6/4/2006 and by David Ball 6/4/2006. David explains further: "The title character is first introduced as a cricketer, 'Jack Hatch the best cricketer in the parish, in the county, in the country!' The narrator hears tell of this wonder, who turns out to be a paragon of all the skills but is never able to meet him in person, finally hearing that he has died. Mitford treats cricket (with tongue admittedly somewhat in cheek) as an epic contest in which the honor of two communities is at stake. In the opening, very loosely connected section, on the other hand, baseball is described as a child's game, to be put away early in life."
Year
1828
1828.10 Trap Ball Scam Reported!
"Two young lads were taken before the police of Glasgow about the 1st of May, for breaking a pane in a shop keeper's window in playing trap ball. Upon being questioned, they stated that they were employed by a glazier to break glass for him at the rate of a penny a pane, and that several other boys were in the same business. The glazier was of course taken into custody."
RochesterDaily Advertiser, June 24, 1828. Submitted by Priscilla Astifan. Note: Should we assume that the event happened in Glasgow Scotland and that the account was taken from a newspaper there?
Year
1828
1828.11 Ballplaying Boys in NYC Perturb the Congregations in Church
Tags:
A "mob of boys, constantly engaged in playing ball [so that] . . . on the Sabbath, while Congregations are in Church, there is more noise and clamour in the vicinity than on any other day [from this] squad of loungers, commencing their daily potations and smoking."
Commercial Advertiser (NY), January 28, 1828, page 2, column 4. Contributed by George Thompson, email of January 9, 2009.
Year
1828
1828.12 Police Nine 1, Men and Boy Sabbath-Breakers 0
Tags:
It is reported that Alderman Peters of NY's Ninth Ward, "together with High Constable Hays, at the head of eight or ten of the peace Officers . . . arrest a number of men and boys for breaking the Sabbath by playing ball in a vacant lot.:
New York Evening Post, December 22, 1828, page 2, column 2: and Commercial Advertiser, December 23, 1828, page 2, columns 2-3. Contributed by George Thompson, email of January 9, 2009.
Year
1828
1828.13 In Christian Story, a Young Girl Chooses Batting Over Tatting
Tags:
Location:
Game:
Age of Players:
A very strict school mistress scolds the title character: "You can't say three times three without missing; you'd rather play at bass-ball, or hunt the hedges for wild flowers, than mend your stockings."
A.M.H. [only initials are given], "The Gipsey Girl," in The Amulet, Or Christian and Literary Remembrancer (W. Baynes and Son, London, 1828), pp 91-104. This short moral tale is set in England, and the girl is described as being eight or nine years old. Accessed 2/4/10 via Google Books search ("amulet or christian" 1828).
Sources:
Reported by Tom Altherr, "Some Findings on Bass Ball," Originals, February 2010. This story was reprinted as "The Gipsy Girl," in The Cabinet Annual: A Christmas and New Year's Gift for 1855 (E. H. Butler, Philadelphia, 1855) page 93ff:
Year
1828
1828.14 Portsmouth NH Reminder: No Ballplaying, Betting in Public Places
A newspaper article reminded all not to "in any street, lane, alley, or other public place [within a mile of the court house] throw any stones, bricks, snow-balls or dirt, or play at ball or any other game in which ball is used; or play at game whatsoever for money; or smoke any pipe, or cigar."
"Notice," New-Hampshire Gazette, July 14, 1828. Accessed via subscription search May 5, 2009. Query: this is not a new ordinance; can we find the original date for this language, in Section 4 of the police by-laws? How does it relate to the Portsmouth ban on cricket in entry #1795.1 above?
Year
1828
1828.15 1828 Advertisement for the Cricket Club in New Orleans
Tags:
Location:
Game:
Age of Players:
The New Orleans Louisiana Advertiser, Feb. 27, 1828, carries an ad saying "Weather permitting, the Cricket Club will meet on the 2d of March, at 10 a.m."
Sources:
The New Orleans Louisiana Advertiser, Feb. 27, 1828
Year
1828
1828.17 Man Recalls July 4th Game Sixty Years Earlier
Tags:
In May 1888, a Boston Globe story reflected the recollection of a game played on July 4, 1828 between the Typhoons and the Hurricanes. A man recalls that at age 20 he played short stop that day.
The article says the game was 6 a side, and played in Skowhegan, ME between the local team, and that of Orono. Gives the names of the players. [ba]
Sources:
Boston Globe, May 29, 1888, page 5. (Text not secured as of September 2018.)
Comment:
As of 2018, we do not know the location, game type, or rules for this game.
It is interesting that the man identified his position as short stop, perhaps indicating that predecessor baserunning games in New England had already developed skill positions' decades before the Knickerbocker club formed.
Query:
Can someone help us obtain the text of this newspaper piece?
Year
1828
1828.19 Game of Base Mentioned in Account of Life at Harvard
Tags:
Age of Players:
The Harvard Register, Feb. 1828; from an article entitled “Life in College.”
"There are some other features of college life we fain would sketch but our pen confesses its weakness in the attempt. Would we could call upon the Engine to give out a history of the
exertions of those who managed it in days of yore; or that we could contrive to make the Delta yield up a narrative of the sports it has witnessed. It could tell , before it took its
present gallows appearance, of Cricket - Base - and Foot ball; it could tell how many pedal members began the game with white, unspotted skins, but limped off at its conclusion
tinged with variegated hues.”
Sources:
The Harvard Register, Feb. 1828; from an article entitled “Life in College.”
Query:
"Pedal members"? A pretty good Harvard friend of Protoball can't explain this term.
"Delta"?
Year
1828
1828.20 Cricket and Base and Football at Harvard?
Tags:
Game:
Age of Players:
"There are some other features of college life we fain would sketch but our pen confesses its weakness in the attempt. Would we could call upon the Engine to give out a history of the exertions of those who managed it in days of yore; or that we could contrive to make the Delta yield up a narrative of the sports it has witnessed. It could tell , before it took its present gallows appearance, of Cricket - Base- and Foot ball; it could tell how many pedal members began the game with white, unspotted skins, but limped off at its conclusion tinged with variegated hues.”
Sources:
The Harvard Register, Feb. 1828; from an article entitled “Life in College.”
Query:
Can we assume that 'pedal members' pertained to the feet, and that it was thus foot ball, and not the two base-running games that caused the bruises?
Year
1828
1829.1 Philadelphians Play Ball
Location:
Game:
A group of Philadelphians who may eventually organize as the Olympic Ball Club begin playing town ball in Philadelphia, PA, but are prohibited from doing so within the city limits by ordinances dating to Colonial times. A site in Camden, New Jersey is used to avoid breaking the laws in Philadelphia. Caution: this unsourced item, retained from the original chronology of 70 items, has been seriously questioned by a researcher familiar with Philadelphia ballplaying. This group may correspond to the eighteen ropemakers whose ball play is cited in “A Word Fitly Spoken,” published in The American Sunday School Magazine of January 1830, pp. 3-5.
Year
1829
1829c.1 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Plays Ball as a Harvard student.
Tags:
Age of Players:
Several sources report that Oliver Wendell Holmes playing ball at Harvard.
[actual Holmes text is still needed]
Sources:
Krout, John A, Annals of American Sport (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1929), p. 115. Per Thomas L. Altherr, "A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball," reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It, p. 240, ref 49. Richard Hershberger, posting to 19CBB on 10/8/2007, found an earlier source - Caylor, O. P., "Early Baseball Days," Washington Post, April 11, 1896. John Thorn reports [email of 2/15/2008] that Holmes biographies do not mention his sporting interests. Note: We still need the original source for the famous Harvard story. Holmes graduated in 1829; the date of play is unconfirmed.
See entry #1824.6 above on Holmes' reference to prep school baseball at Phillips Academy.
Comment:
We still need the original source for the famous Harvard story. Holmes graduated in 1829; the date of play as cited is unconfirmed. The Holmes story reportedly appears in JM Ward's "Base Ball: How to Become a Player," where he says OWH told it "to the reporter of a Boston paper." (Ward page citation?)
Query:
Small Puzzle: Harvard's 19th Century playing field was "Holmes Field;" was it named for this Holmes? Harvard is in Cambridge MA.
Circa
1829
1829.2 Round Ball Played in MA
Location:
Game:
Age of Players:
From a letter to the Mills Commission: "Mr. Lawrence considers Round Ball and Four Old Cat one and the same game; the Old Cat game merely being the they could do when there were not more than a dozen players, all told. . . . Mr. Lawrence says, as a boy, he played Round Ball in 1829.
"So far as Mr. Lawrence's argument goes for Round Ball being the father of Base Ball it is all well enough, but there are two things that cannot be accounted for; the conception of the foul ball, and the abolishment of the rules that a player could be put out by being hit by a thrown ball. No one remembers the case of a player being injured by being hit by a thrown ball, so that cannot be the reason for that change. The foul rule made the greatest skill of the Massachusetts game count for nothing - the batting skill - the back handed and slide batting. Mr. Stoddard told me that there were 9 of the 14 Upton batters who never batted ahead."
Sources:
Henry Sargent Letter to the Mills Commission, June 25, 1905.
Year
1829
1829.3 Small Cambridge MA Schoolground Crimps Base and Cricket Play
Tags:
Age of Players:
his new Cambridge school too small. "[N]one of the favorite games of foot-ball, hand-ball, base or cricket could be played in the grounds with any satisfaction, for the ball would be constantly flying over the fence, beyond which he boys could not go without asking special leave. This was a damper on the more ranging & athletic exercises."
-- Richard Henry Dana, on the limitations of school ground play at his new school in Cambridge MA
Sources:
Robert Metdorf, ed., An Autobiographical Sketch (1815-1842) (Shoe String Press, Hamden CT, 1953), pages 51-52. 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), page 38. The text of the autobiography is unavailable via Google Books as of 11/16/2008.
Comment:
Richard Henry Dana, later the author of Two Years Before the Mast and a leading abolitionist, was 14 in 1829.
Year
1829
1829.4 In Upstate NY, A Teen's Death on the Ballfield
Tags:
"As a number of the students at Fairfield academy were amusing themselves with a game of ball, on the 19th inst., a young man by the name of Philo Petrie, . . . of the town of Little Falls, was hit on the side of his head be a ball club and died almost instantly. He was about 17 years old."
New-York Spectator, October 30, 1829, page 2, column 5; taken from the Herkimer Herald. Posted by George Thompson to the 19CBB listserve on January 3, 2010. The Jamestown [NY] Journal reran the piece on November 4, 1829: accessed via subscription search on 2/17/2009. Fairfield NY is about 15 miles east of Utica in Central New York, and about 10 miles north of Herkimer and Little Falls.
Comment:
The game played was wicket. See the Ilion Citizen, March 13, 1903:
One Saturday afternoon, in the fall of 1829 while a party of academics were playing a game of wicket ball on the "green," Philo Petrie, a student, was hit by a bat and almost instantly fell dead. Ozias Nellis was at the wicket, defending it, and in his playing raised his bat to strike the fall; as it came he struck but missed the ball, and momentum of the blow swung Nellis and the bat around, raising the bat as it went, and hit Petrie, who was standing near, on the side of his head. Petrie suddenly clapped both hands to his head, and in a moment fell headlong to the ground. No blame was laid on Nellis; the blow was accidental, but fatal.
Year
1829
1829.5 Town Ball Takes Off in Philadelphia?
Location:
Game:
A group of young rope makers is reported to have played a game of ball in 1829 at 18th and Race Streets.
William Ryczek, Baseball's First Inning (McFarland, 2009), page 114. Ryczek cites a 2006 email from Richard Hershberger as the source of the location of the game. He identifies this game as perhaps the earliest known form of town ball, but Hershberger is unconvinced (see Warning, below).
Warning:
Citing the makeup of these players as differing from that of early town ball players' reports, and seeing the 1829 account as more of a morality tale than a reliable report, Richard Hershberger (email of 10/31/12) discounts this item as an account of the origins of Philadelphia town ball.
In 1831 two organized groups, which later merged, played town ball: for a succinct history of the origins of Philadelphia town ball, see Richard Hershberger, "A Reconstruction of Philadelphia Town Ball," Base Ball, volume 1 number 2 (Fall 2007), pp 28-29.
Query:
Can we find the source of this 1829 account?
Year
1829
1829.7 While Playing Peacefully, "Wisdom Stole His Bat and Ball"
The poem "Childhood and His Visitors," evidently first printed [anonymously] in 1829 and appearing in many other places in the ensuing decades, turns on the line "Then Wisdom stole his bat and ball" which signifies the moment when childhood ends and manhood begins. Wisdom then, the verse continues, "taught him . . . why no toy may last forever." One interpretation may be that Childhood was using his bat and ball while "hard at play/Upon a bank of blushing flowers:/ Happy - he knew not whence or why" when Wisdom finally paid her visit. Thus, an image of bat and ball symbolizes immaturity.
The poem was referenced by Hugh MacDougall in a positing to the 19CBB listserve on 2/17/2010.
A possible initial source is The Casket, a Miscellany, Consisting of Unpublished Poems (John Murray, London, 1829), pages 21-23. Accessed 2/19/2010 via Google Books search ("the casket a miscellany"). In 1865 the piece, dated 1829, appears in The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Volume I (Widdleton, New York, 1865), pages 370-372. Accessed 2/19/2010 via Google Books search ("bat and ball" 1865 widdleton). Assuming that Praed was the actual author, as his wife thought, the poem had appeared during the year when, at age 27, the young Romantic turned away from thoughts of blushing flowers and toward a career as a British lawyer and Tory politician.
Year
1829
1830.1 Children's Amusements Describes Bat/Ball Play for Brits and Yanks
The book Children's Amusements, published in Oxford (England) and New York, contains an illustration of ball playing (page 9) and this text (page 10): "Playing ball is much practised by school boys and is an excellent exercise to unbend the mind, and restore to the body that elasticity and spring which the close application to sedentary employment in their studies within doors, has a tendency to clog, dull or blunt. But, when practised as is the common method, with a club or bat great care is necessary, as sometimes sad accidents have happened, by its slipping from the hand, or hitting some of their fellows. We would therefore, recommend Fives as a safer play in which the club is not used and which is equally good for exercise. The writer of this, beside other sad hurts which he has been witness of in the use of clubs, knew a youth who had his skull broke badly with one, and it nearly cost him his life."
Children's Amusements, [New York, Samuel Wood, 1820], p. 9. Note: we need to sort out the #1820.1 and #1830.1 entries for this title.
Year
1830
1830c.2 Thoreau Associates "Fast Day" with Base-Ball Played in Russet Fields
Location:
Game:
"April 10 [1856]. Fast-Day. . . . . I associate this day, when I can remember it, with games of baseball played over beyond the hills in the russet fields toward Sleepy Hollow, where the snow was just melted and dried up.
Submitted by David Nevard. On 8/2/2005, George Thompson submitted the following reference: Torrey, Bradford, Journal of Henry David Thoreau vol. 8, page 270. He notes that Princeton University Press is publishing a new edition, but isn't up to 1856 yet.
Circa
1830
1830.3 Union General Joseph Hooker Plays Baseball as a Boy
Tags:
Game:
Age of Players:
Hooker is recalled as having been enthusiastic about baseball in about 1830. [Note: Hooker was about 16 then.] "[H]e enjoyed and was active in all boyish sorts. At baseball, then a very different game from now [1895], he was very expert; catching was his forte. He would take a ball from almost in front of the bat, so eager, active, and dexterous were his movements."
Franklin Bonney, "Memoir of Joseph Hooker," Springfield Republican, May 8 1895. From Henderson text at pp. 147-148.
Hooker was born in 1814 and raised in Hadley, MA.
Year
1830
1830.4 School Boys Play Base Ball Regularly at Portsmouth NH Grammar School
Location:
Letter from J. A. Mendum to Albert Spalding, My 17, 1905.. From Henderson, pp. 149-150, no ref given. John Thorn on 3/4/2006 notes that the letter included a clip from the New Hampshire Gazette titled "Origin of Baseball. Mr. Mendum Played the Game in Portsmouth in 1830." XXX request scan from John Thorn
Sources:
Cited in Peterson, "The Man Who Invented Baseball," p. 10 (1939)
Year
1830
1830s.5 Wicket Played in The Western Reserve [OH]
Game:
Age of Players:
"How far the Connecticut game of wicket has travelled I cannot say, but it is certain that when the Western Reserve region of Ohio was settled from Connecticut, the game was taken along. Our member [of the Connecticut Society of Colonial War], Professor Thomas Day Seymour of Yale, tells me that wicket was a favorite game of the students at Western Reserve College then located at Hudson Ohio . . . . 'Up to 1861,' he says, 'the standard games at our college were wicket and baseball, with wicket well in the lead. This game was in no sense a revival. A proof of this is the fact that young men coming to college [from?] all over the Reserve were accustomed to the game at home. My impression is that my father recognized the game as familiar to him his boyhood [probably in New England], but of this I am not absolutely certain. The ball was about 5 and a half inches in diameter; the wickets were about 4 inches above the ground, and about 5 feet long. The bats were very heavy, -- of oak, about 50 inches long, with an almost circular lower end of (say) 8 inches in diameter. The ball was so heavy that most bowlers merely rolled it with such a twist that they could impart; but some bowlers almost threw it. Mark Hanna was a star player about 1860, and the rule had to be called on his that the ball must touch ghe ground three times before it struck the wicket. The bats were so heavy that only the strong (and quick) batter dared to wait until the ball was opposite him and then strike. I was always satisfied to steer the ball off to one side. The rules favored the batter and many runns were made.'"
Sources:
Letter from Thomas Day Seymour to "My dear Kinsman" from New Haven CT, April 25, 1905. Reproduced in "The Game of Wicket and Some Old-Time Wicket Players," in George Dudley Seymour, Papers and Addresses of the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Connecticut, Volume II of the Proceedings of the Society, (n. p., 1909.) page 289.
Comment:
Yale Professor T. D Seymour was born in 1848, and thus about 12 years old in the days he saw wicket played at Western Reserve College in 1860. Hudson OH is about 25 miles SE of Cleveland. George Dudley Seymour (p. 289) decribes the local cummunity as "of pure Connecticut stock."
Decade
1830s
1830s.6 Players Drink Egg-Nog in Base Ball Intervals in Portsmouth NH
Location:
Brewster, Charles W., Rambles About Portsmouth, Second Series [Lewis Brewster, Portsmouth, 1869], p. 269. Per Thomas L. Altherr, "A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball," reprinted in David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, ref # 67.
Decade
1830s
1830c.7 Boston Gent Recalls Old Game of "Massachusetts Run-Around"
Location:
T. King wrote to the Mills Commission in 1905. "Just a word in regard to the old game of Massachusetts Run-around. We always pronounced the name as if it were run-round without the "a," but I presume, technically that should be incorporated.
"This was the old time game which I played between 44 and 50 years ago [1855-1861 - LM.], and which I heard my father speak of as playing 35 to 40 years before that, carrying it back to the vicinity of 1830." [Actually, the arithmetic implies the vicinity of 1820.]
Sources:
T. King, Letter to the Mills Commission, November 24, 1905.
Query:
Notes: can we establish the age of King's father at King's birth?
Can we determine where the two Kings might have played?
Circa
1830
1830c.8 Chapbook Illustrates Trap-ball
Juvenile Pastimes in Verse [New York, Mahlon Day], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 193. The book describes "several popular games," including trap-ball, with poetry and woodcuts.
Circa
1830
1830c.9 Indoor Batsman Reappears in Publication
My Father [New York, Mahlon Day], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 193. The picture from Good Examples (#1823.3, above) is included without accompanying test.
Circa
1830
1830c.10 Baseball-like Scene Reappears in Children's Book
Sports of Childhood [Northampton MA, E. Turner], per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 193. Coverage of trap-ball is accompanied by the same base-ball like scene found earlier in Remarks on Children's Play (#1811.4, above).
Circa
1830
1830s.11 In MO, the Slowly Migrating Mormons Play Ball
Location:
"Ball was a favorite sport with the men, and the Prophet frequently took a hand in the sport."
John Doyle Lee, Confessions of John D. Lee: Mormonism Unveiled [1877], Chapter 8.
Submitted by John Thorn, 8/17/2004 supplemented 2/22/2006. Note: Are we sure that "1830s" is the right date here? The text may imply a later date.
Decade
1830s
1830s.12 Watching Wicket Ball in Buffalo NY
Tags:
Location:
Game:
Age of Players:
"[The Indians] would lounge on the steps of the 'Old First Church,' where they could look at our young men playing wicket ball in front of the church (no fences there then):, and this was a favorite ball ground."
" . . . the boys, who must always have their fun, did not always 'Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy,' but would make a holiday of it by a vigorous game of ball, in some secluded spot in the suburbs of he town . . . "
Sources:
Samuel M. Welch, Home History: Recollections of Buffalo During the Decade from 1830 to 1840, or Fifty Years Since [P. Paul and bro., Buffalo, 1890], pages 112 and 220. Submitted by John Thorn 9/13/2006. Also see Thomas L. Altherr, "Chucking the Old Apple: Recent Discoveries of Pre-1840 North American Ball Games," Base Ball, Volume 2, number 1 (Spring 2008), page 38.
Query:
Are these Welch's own recollections?
Decade
1830s
1830s.13 "Baseball" Found in Several Works by Mary Russell Mitford
Submitted by Hugh MacDougall, Cooperstown NY, 12/6/2006:
"Everyone knows of Jane Austen's use of the term baseball in her novel Northanger Abbey (see item #1798.1). I recently came across, online, an 1841 anthology of works by the English essayist Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1865). A search revealed five uses of the work "baseball." What is intriguing is that every reference seems to assume that "baseball" whatever it is is a familiar rough and tumble game played by girls (and apparently girls only) between the ages of 6 and 10 or so.."
The "baseball" usages:
[] "The Tenants of Beechgrove:" "But better than playing with her doll, better even than baseball, or sliding and romping, does she like to creep of an evening to her father's knee:
[] "Jack Hatch" see item #1828.9 above for two references.
[] "Our Village [introduction]": " . . . Master Andrew's four fair-haired girls who are scrambling and squabbling at baseball on the other." (See item #1824.3 above.)
[] Belford Regis: "What can be prettier than this, unless it be the fellow-group of girls . . . who are laughing and screaming round the great oak; then darting to and fro, in a game compounded of hide-and-seek and baseball. Now tossing the ball high, high amidst the branches; now flinging it low along the common, bowling as it were, almost within reach of the cricketers; now pursuing, now retreating, jumping shouting, bawling almost shrieking with ecstasy; whilst one sunburnt black-eyed gipsy throws forth her laughing face from behind the trunk of an old oak, and then flings a newer and gayer ball fortunate purchase of some hoarded sixpence among her happy playmates.
Comment:
David Block's forthcoming 2019 book may address the rules of English Base-Ball in this period.
Query:
MacDougall asks: "Mary Mitford seems to have a pretty good idea of what the girls are playing, when they play at 'baseball' but it seems to have little or nothing to do with the sport we now call by that name. Does anyone know what it was?"
Decade
1830s
1830.14 Australia's First Recorded Cricket Match Played
Tags:
The Sydney Gazette [date not supplied] reported on a match between a military club and the Australia Cricket Club, comprising native-born members. They played at "the Racecourse" at Sydney's Hyde Park, attracted as many as 200 spectators, and set stakes of £20 per side.
Egan, Jack, The Story of Cricket in Australia (ABC Books, 1987), page 12.
Year
1830
1830s.15 In Buffalo NY, Balls Formed from Fish Noses
Location:
Age of Players:
Writing over 50 years later, Samuel Welch recalled:
"the fish I bought as a small boy at that time [1830-1840], at one cent per pound, mainly to get its noses for cores for our balls, to make them bound, to play the present National Game."
Welch also recalls the local enthusiasm for ballplaying: "the boys, who must have their fun, did not always 'Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy,' but would make a holiday of it by a vigorous game of ball, in some secluded spot in the suburbs of the town."
Sources:
Welch, Samuel L., Home History. Recollections of Buffalo during the Decade from 1830 to 1840, or Fifty Years Since (Peter Paul and Brother, Buffalo, 1891), page 353 and page 220, respectively. [Text unavailable via Google Books as of 11/16/2008.] See also Thomas L. Altherr, “A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball: Baseball and Baseball-Type Games in the Colonial Era, Revolutionary War, and Early American Republic.." Nine, Volume 8, number 2 (2000), p. 15-49. Reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It – see pages 245-6, and ref #82.
Decade
1830s
1830s.16 Future President Lincoln Plays Town Ball, Joins Hopping Contests
Tags:
Game:
Age of Players:
James Gurley (Gourley?) knew Abraham Lincoln from 1834, when Lincoln was 25. In 1866 he gave an informal interview to William Herndon, the late President's biographer and former law partner in Springfield IL. His 1866 recollection:
"We played the old-fashioned game of town ball - jumped - ran - fought and danced. Lincoln played town ball - he hopped well - in 3 hops he would go 40.2 [feet?] on a dead level. . . . He was a good player - could catch a ball."
Sources:
Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln (U Illinois Press, 1998), page 451.
See also Beveridge, Albert J., Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858 (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1928), Volume I, page 298. The author provides source for this info as: "James Gourley's" statement, later established as 1866. Weik MSS. Per John Thorn, 7/9/04.
Warning:
There is some ambiguity about the city intended in this recollection. Springfield IL and New Salem IL seem mostly likely locations.
Comment:
A previous Protoball entry, listed as #1840s.16: "He [Abraham Lincoln in the 1840s] joined with gusto in outdoor sports foot-races, jumping and hopping contests, town ball, wrestling . . . " Source: a limited online version of the 1997 book edited by Douglas L Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, Herndon's Informants (U of Illinois Press, 1997 or 1998). Posted to 19CBB on 12/11/2007 by Richard Hershberger. Richard notes that the index to the book promises several other references to Lincoln's ballplaying but [Jan. 2008] reports that the ones he has found are unspecific.. Note: can we chase this book down and collect those references?
Earlier versions of this find were submitted by Richard Hershberger (2007) and John Thorn (2004).
Decade
1830s
1830.17 NYS Squirrel Hunters Stop for Ballplaying
Location:
From an account that appeared 53 later, involving a 25-year-old who lived about 20 miles south of Buffalo NY:
"Mr. Wickham had a great taste for hunting, and he relates the incidents of a squirrel hunt that took place in Collins in 1830. Two sides were chosen, consisting of eight hunters on a side, and the party that scored the most points by producing the tails of the game secured, were declared the victors. . . . About 4 o'clock P.M. the hunters came in and the scores counted up and it was found that Timothy Clark's side were victorious by over one hundred counts and the day's sport wound up by an old fashioned game of .base ball, in which Timothy Clark's men again came off victorious."
Erasmus Briggs, History of the Original Town of Concord, Being the Present Towns of Concord, Collins, N. Collins, and Sardinia Erie County New York (Rochester, Union and Advertiser Company's Print, 1883), page 526. Submitted by David Nevard, 2/22/07.
Year
1830
1830.18 At PA Ballfield, Man Asks English Question, Receives American Answer
Location:
"I have spent an hour in a beautiful grove in this borough [West Chester PA] witnessing the sports of its denizens. All attorneys, editors, physicians, were engaged in playing ball, while the Judge of the County was seated calmly by, preserving an account of the game! I asked a very respectable gentleman to whom I had been introduced, who were the principal men in the town present; and he answered, that there were no principal men in the town all were equalized, or attained no superiority save that of exertions fro the public weal . . ."Adams Sentinel (Gettysburg PA; August 10, 1830), page 7, as taken from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Posted to 19CBB in October 2008 by John Thorn.
Year
1830
1830s.19 NH Lad Had Happy Games of Ball
Age of Players:
"I had many happy hours with the village boys in games of ball and I spy. "
Sources:
A. Andrews, ed., Christopher C. Andrews: Recollections: 1829-1922 (Arthur H. Clark, Cleveland, 1928), page 25. 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), page 30. Tom notes that Andrews lived in the Upper Village of Hillsboro NH.
The text of the Andrews book is not accessible via Google Books as of 11/15/2008.
Comment:
Hillsboro NH is about 25 miles NW of Manchester NH.
Decade
1830s
1830s.20 In GA, Men Played Fives, Schoolboys Played Base and Town Ball
Location:
Game:
"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.
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.
Query:
Team hand-ball? Really? Wasn't it usually a one-on-one game?
Decade
1830s
1830s.21 Future OH Senator Has Little Interest in Playing Ball
Age of Players:
"Notwithstanding his studious habits as a boy [Clement Vallandigham] was fond of out-door sports, although never very fond of what the youngsters call playing. He much preferred going out gunning or fusing, to playing ball, or any of the other games so eagerly pursued as a general thing, by boys."
Sources:
James L. Vallandigham, A Life of Clement L. Vallandigham (Turnbell Brothers, Baltimore, 1872), page 10. 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), page 32. Clement Vallandigham was born in 1820 in Lisbon OH and grew up there. The biography, barren for our purposes was accessed 11/15/2008 via a "life of clement" Google Books search.
Decade
1830s
1830s.22 Ballplaying Recurs in Abolitionist's Life -- From Age 10 to Harvard
Tags:
You may think of Thomas Wentworth Higginson [b. 1823] as a noted abolitionist, or as the mentor of Emily Dickinson, but he was also a ballplayer and sporting advocate [see also #1858.17]. Higginson's autobiography includes several glimpses of MA ballplaying:
- at ten he knew many Harvard students - "their nicknames, their games, their individual haunts, we watched them at football and cricket [page 40]"
- at his Cambridge school "there was perpetual playing of ball and fascinating running games [page 20]".
- he and his friends "played baseball and football, and a modified cricket, and on Saturdays made our way to the tenpin alleys [page 36]".
- once enrolled at Harvard College [Class of 1841] himself, he used "the heavy three-cornered bats and large balls of the game we called cricket [page 60]." Note: sounds a bit like wicket?
- in his early thirties he was president of a cricket club [and a skating club and a gymnastics club] in Worcester MA. [Pages 194-195]
See also #1858.17.
Sources:
Source: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1898). 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 33-34 and ref #29. Accessed 11/16/2008 via Google Books search for <cheerful yesterdays>.
Decade
1830s
1830s.23 In South-Central Illinois, Teachers Joined in On Town Ball
Location:
Game:
"The bull pen, town ball, and drop the handkerchief were among the sports indulged in on the school grounds, and the teacher usually joined in with the sports."
A. T. Strange, ed., Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois, Volume 2 (Munsell, Chicago, 1918), page 792. Contributed by Jeff Kittel, January 31, 2010. Accessed 2/5/10 via Google Books search ("town ball and drop). Jeff's comments: "The author is talking about the history of education in Montgomery County, IL, which is located south of Springfield and NE of St. Louis. It's tough to date this. He speaks of '75 or 80 years ago,' so it's probably the 1830s and 1840s."
Decade
1830s
1830s.24 Union Cricket Club Gains Strength in Philadelphia PA
Location:
Game:
"No city took to the sport [cricket] with more avidity than Philadelphia where the game had been played since the 1830s by the Union Club"
William Ryczek, Baseball's First Inning, McFarland, 2009), page 105. No source is cited. Ryczek goes on to say that Englishmen who moved to work in the city's wool industry was one root cause of cricket's success there.
Decade
1830s
1830.25 Proud Father Lauds Son's Ballplaying Prowess
"My son Roger is a rare lad . . . He can run like a deer, jump like a catamount, wrastle like a bear . . . . He can pitch quates like all creations, he can play ball like a cat o' nine tails, and throw a stone where you could never see it again."
"Parental Partiality. My Son Roger," Salem [MA] Gazette, May 7, 1830. Taken from the New York Constitution. Accessed via subscription search, April 9, 2009. Roger is described as 19 years old. Query: Any chance of discovering the name and residence of the author?
Year
1830
1830c.26 Plymouth MA Boys Play Round Ball, Other Ballgames: Ballmaking Described
Location:
Writing about 70 years later, William Davis considers the range of pastimes in his boyhood: "After the hoop came, as now, the ball games, skip, one old cat, two old cat, hit or miss, and round ball. We made our own balls, winding yarn over a core of India rubber, until the right size was reached, and then working a loop stitch all around it with good, tightly spun twine. Attempts were occasionally made to play ball in the streets, but the by-laws of the town forbidding it were rigidly enforced."
Sources:
William T. Davis, Plymouth Memories of an Octogenarian (Memorial Press, Plymouth MA, 1906), page 104. Accessed 2/5/10 via Google Books search (plymouth octogenarian). Plymouth MA is about 35 miles SE of Boston on Cape Cod Bay.
Query:
Query: do we know the nature of the ball games of "skip" and "hit or miss?"
Circa
1830
1830c.27 Lenox Academy Students Play Wicket
Location:
Game:
Recalling a genial local sheriff, the author writes: "We well remember the urbanity of his manner as he passed the students of Lenox Academy, always bowing to them and greeting them with a pleasant salutation, which tended to increase their self-respect . . . .As he drove by us when we were playing 'wicket' - the game of ball them fashionable - he did not drive his stylish horse and gig over our wickets, as many took a malicious pleasure in doing, but turned aside, with a pleasant smile . . . ."
Sources:
J. E. A. Smith, The History of Pittsfield From the Year 1800 to the Year 1876 (C. W. Bryan & Co., Springfield MA, 1876), pp 401-402. Accessed 2/5/2010 via Google Books search <history pittsfield 1876>.
Comment:
Lenox Academy was in Lenox MA, about 7 miles S of Pittsfield, and about 35 miles SE of Albany NY.
Caveat: It is difficult to estimate a date for this anecdote.
Query:
The gentleman, Major Brown, lived in Pittsfield from 1812 to 1838. As the event seems to be the author's personal recollection, verifying if and when he attended the Lenox Academy may narrow the range of possibilities for the period he recalls playing.
Circa
1830
1830c.28 Fictional Mom Recalls Liking to Bat Ball as a Girl
Game:
Age of Players:
Tom Altherr located a fictional story in The Child's Friend (January 1848) in which a mother recounts to her son, George, how she 'liked boys' playthings best' when she was a little girl and could 'drive hoop, spin top, bat ball, jump, and climb' as well as her brothers could."
Sources:
The Child's Friend, January 1848. Full citation needed. Submitted by Deb Shattuck, May 2013.
Warning:
It is, of course, difficult to specify a reasonable date for a fictional account like this one.
Circa
1830
1830s.29 PA Schoolboys Recalled as Playing Town Ball and Long Ball
Age of Players:
"Here we played town ball, corner ball, sow ball and long ball. Sometimes we would jump, to see how high we could leap; then it was hop, step and jump. Once in a while we played ring, provided the girls would help, and generally they would..."
Sources:
Samuel Penniman Bates, Jacob Fraise, Warner Beers, History of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, Containing a History of the County, its Townships, Towns, Villages, Schools, Churches, Industries, Etc; Portraits of Early Settlers and Prominent Men; Biographies; History of Pennsylvania, Statistical and Miscellaneous Matter, etc. (Chicago: Warner, Beers and Company, 1887), page 300.
This observation is attributed to John B. Kaufman, a teacher turned surveyor in Franklin County, PA , reflecting on his childhood spent in a log school house in "50 odd years ago": Kaufman was born in 1827. Find confirmed 10/9/2014 via search of <"john b. kaufman" "long ball">
Comment:
Franklin County PA is in south central PA, on the Maryland border. Its population in 1830 was about 35,000.
Query:
"Sow Ball?"
Decade
1830s
1830c.30 "Old Boys" Play Throwback Game to 100 Tallies in Ohio
Tags:
Game:
Ball Playing -- Old Boys at it!
Base-ball was a favorite game of the early settlers at the gatherings which brought men and boys together -- such as raisings, bees, elections, trainings, Fourth of Julys, etc., etc., and we are glad to see that the manly sport is still in vogue, at least in 'benighted Ashtabula.' We learn by the Sentinel that a matched game came off at Jefferson on the 4th, fourteen selected players on each side, chosen by Judge Dann and Squire Warren. The party winning the first hundred scores was to be the victor. Judge Dann's side won the game by eleven scores. The Sentinel says:
There were thirteen innings without a tally. [This suggests that, at least by 1859, this game used one-out-side-out innings.] The highest number of scores was made by James R. Giddings, a young chap of sixty-four, who led the field, having made a tally as often as the club came to his hand. The game excited great interest, and was witnessed by a large number of spectators. The supper was prepared by 'our host' at the Jefferson House.
Note: Protoball's PrePro data base shows another reference to a group, including Giddings, playing this predecessor game in Jefferson; see http://protoball.org/In_Jefferson_OH_in_July_1859.
Sources:
Cleveland [Ohio] Daily Leader, Saturday July 9, 1859, First Edition.
See clipping at http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2414996/18590709_cleveland/.
Warning:
We have assigned this to a date of ca. 1830 on the basis that players in their sixties seem to have played this (same) game as young adults. Comments welcome on this assumption. Were the southern shores of Lake Erie settled by Europeans at that date?
Comment:
Ashtabula (1850 population: 821 souls) is about 55 miles NE of Cleveland OH and a few miles from Lake Erie. The town of Jefferson OH is about 8 miles inland [S] of Ashtabula.
"The Sentinel" is presumably the Ashtabula Sentinel.
Query:
Further commentary on the site and date of this remembered game are welcome.
Was the Ashtabula area well-settled by 1830?
Circa
1830
1830s.32 Spiked Egg-Nog Between Innings?
Location:
Game:
Age of Players:
"Players consumed egg-nog 'between intervals of base-ball playing' on nearby Shapleigh's Island and taunted the temperance forces." -- Tom Altherr
Sources:
Charles W Brewster, Rambles Around Portsmouth, second series ((Portsmouth, John Melcher, 1869), pages 5-6. Per Thomas L. Altherr, “A Place Leavel Enough to Play Ball: Baseball and Baseball-Type Games in the Colonial Era, Revolutionary War, and Early American Republic.." Nine, Volume 8, number 2 (2000), p. 15-49. Reprinted in David Block, Baseball before We Knew It – see page 244 and ref #68.
Decade
1830s
1830s.33 The Balk Rule Existed Before the 1845 Knick Rules?
Tags:
"A Balk is a Base."--Any one having a remembrance of the ball games of his youth must recollect that in the game of base, if the tosser made a balk to entice the individual making the round from his post, the latter had the right to walk to the next base unscathed. Pity it is that the Hudson folks engaged in the late political movement in Columbia County did not remember that "a balk is a base" in the games of children of a larger growth." (Note: This led into a lengthy diatribe on local politics that I did not attempt to make sense of. - David Block)
Sources:
Rondout Freeman , June 5, 1847:
Warning:
Dating this remembered practice to the 1830s is somewhat arbitrary, as the writer's age in 1847 is unknown. Locating the practice in NY State is also uncertain.
Comment:
[] "Here is another early example of baseball terminology being used to illustrate a non-sports topic."The text appeared in the June 5, 1847 issue of the Roundout Freeman (Roundout was a Hudson River community that has since been swallowed by the town of Kingston)."I had always supposed that the balk rule was introduced by the crafters of the New York game, but this passage suggests it began to be practiced at some earlier time."-- David Block, 11/12/2010[] "I wrote in my book [R. Hershberger. Strike Four, Rowman and Littlefield, 2019, page 37] that the balk rule seemed to be novel to the 1845 Knickerbocker rules. Evidently not. While this is two years later, it also is from [nearly] a hundred miles away in Kingston, NY, and presented as a homespun saying from the writer's youth." -- Richard Hershberger, 19CBB posting, 12/9/2020[] John Thorn, email of 1/31/2023: "This will testify to the antiquity of the balk rule and give a hint that it meant a feint." -- John Thorn, 1/31/2023[] As of February 2023, Protoball has no other data on pre-1845 balk rules. Richard Hershberger hasn't found any yet.[] Added Local color: "Rondout has been since 1870, an unincorporated hamlet within the city of Kingston (where I lived for decade; it was called "Rondout" because of its adjoining Roundout Creek, which fed into the Hudson River). The Rondout Freeman in its first incarnation may have indeed lasted till 1847 (founded 1845):https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86071034/."Hudson is a large city about 25 miles north of Kingston, on the other side of the Hudson River, in Columbia County. Today a bridge connects my hometown of Catskill (west bank) with Hudson (east bank). Taghkanic is the proper spelling of the tribe for whom today is named the Taconic Parkway."
-- John Thorn, email of 12/10/2020.
Query:
Is a balk rule -- or the "stolen" base -- known in cricket or English Base Ball? Or in any pre-1845 baserunning game?
Protoball welcomes further comment on the possible origin of the balk rule.
Decade
1830s
1830s.34 1883 Account Reflects on Details of "Town Ball" Played Decades Earlier in PA
Tags:
Game:
Age of Players:
"Old Town Ball: Reminiscences of the Game by a Very Old Boy.
"I deem it probable that a description of the the game called 'Town Ball' fifty years ago, from which base ball of the present originated, will prove interesting to your readers. I propose to give it to them as it comes back to me through the mental mist of half a century."
As described, the old game used:
[] at least four players on a side, but the average team size was about eight.
[] a flipped paddle to determine first ups.
[] four bases, called "corners" and set about 50 feet apart
[] home was called "the holes."
[] the pitching distance was 30 feet.
[] the batting "paddle" was about two feet long and 4 inches wide, wielded with one or two hands
[] the ball was 2 inches in diameter, made of cork and rubber strips, wrapped yarn and then in a buckskin cover.
[] there was a balk rule, and fast pitching was disallowed.
[] There was a bound rule, and plugging. Innings were all-out-side-out
[] A Lazarus rule allowed a side to earn a new inning if its last batter hit three straight homers
Players came from "Pipe Town, Hog Town, Scotch Hill, the Point and Bayard's Town. Sligo and Allegheny" were often foes.
Sources:
Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, May 2, 1883
Warning:
Some portions of this image were indistinct, and some areas were clipped off.
Comment:
Richard Hershberger: "A hole was definitely a feature of very early baseball (and very early cricket, too). I expect this is a vestige of that practice, which had disappeared in most American baseball. It is the use of "holes" equating these with "home plate" that I wonder about. Were there more than one hole at home?
Note: Willughby, writing around 1650, describes a baserunning game (hornebillets) that used holes instead of bases, and that is similar to the old-cat game. See Hornebillets.
Decade
1830s
1830s.36 Town Ball, Bull Pen, Tip Cat Played in the Antebellum South
Game:
The Carrolton (GA) Free Press, April 26, 1889, runs an item from Gainesville about how the old timers will play a game of town ball, a game they played in the 1820s, 30s and 50s. The item notes that younger people won't be invited to play, as they have no idea what the game is.
The item also claims that Town ball, bull pen and tip cat were commonly played in the antebellum South.
Sources:
The Carrolton (GA) Free Press, April 26, 1889
Decade
1830s
1830s.37 Cat, Town and Corner Ball recalled in Pittston
Game:
Age of Players:
A letter writer to the Pittston Gazette in 1851 recalled as a schoolboy playing Cat Ball, "towns-ball" and corner ball.
The date of play is uncertain. The place isn't even certain.
Sources:
Pittston Gazette, Feb. 28, 1851
Decade
1830s
1830s.38 "A Balk Is A Base"
Tags:
Age of Players:
"Any one having remembrance of the ball games of his youth, must recollect that in the game of base if the tosser made a balk to entice the individual making the round from his post, the latter had the right to walk tot he next base unscathed. Pity it is that the Hudson folks . . . did not remember that 'a balk is a base' in the games of children of a larger growth."
Sources: Rondout Freeman,June 5, 1847 (Kingston NY)
Warning: Dating this remembered practice to the 1830s is somewhat arbitrary, as the writer's age in 1847 is unknown. Locating the practice in NY State is also uncertain.
Comment: John Thorn, email of 1/31/2023: "This will testify to the antiquity of the balk rule and give a hint that is meant a feint."
Query: Do we have other evidence on the pre-Knickerbocker usage of a balk rule?
Decade
1830s
1830c.39 Report: "Groups of Full Grown Players At Base and Cricket" Recalled in New York
Tags:
Age of Players:
"The denizens of a large city have not the same opportunities of healthful exercise as are enjoyed by those who dwell in the country. A few years ago New York was, to some extent, an exception to this remark. Large open grounds, in different parts of the city, invited the inhabitants to athletick exercises, and groups of full grown players at base and cricket were to be seen on them every pleasant afternoon. Those open grounds are now compactly built up with lordly houses, and ballclubs, we believe, are extinct. But the means of agreeable and salutary exercise are still within the reach of
the dusty city, and the pale student and clerk. Fuller's Gymnasium supplies them, and at a cost much less than that which it saves from the physician and the apothecary. His establishment is conducted under his own superintendence,and is well conducted in every respect.”
Sources:
The Plaindealer, New York, April 15, 1837.
Comment:
David Block, 5/3/2021, on the idea that ballplaying clubs were though to be extinct in 1837: "Not quite extinct."
Tom Gilbert, 5/4/2021: "We knew -- largely indirectly -- that there were adult bb clubs and a thriving bb scene in NYC in the 1830s and probably earlier, but it is great to see confirmation, and by a contemporary source. This also underlines the importance of Stevens's Elysian Fields in helping to preserve the incipient sport from being snuffed out by rapid urban development, in a sort of incubator.
(And the connection between the gymnastics movement and the baseball movement is closer than might appear. We can identify Knickerbocker bbc club members, Excelsiors and others who exercised at NYC and Brooklyn gyms, including I believe Fuller's)."
Stephen Katz, (19CBB posting 5/4/2021) points out that ironically, 1837 is also the year claimed for the establishment of the Gothams. See Wheaton letter at 1837.1
Query:
Should our dating at circa 1835 be modified?
Circa
1830