Rise of Amateur Cricket
Following the Civil War, cricket grew into in amateur sport with much less broad appeal than it had had before. This manifestation can be seen in the foundation of the Staten Island Cricket and Baseball Club. The club was to be based on "the broadest and most liberal interpretation of the terms 'gentlemen' and amateur." They were not that interested in playing baseball, but in founding a more responsive club in the area than the St George's Cricket Club. The members of the Seabright Lawn Tennis Club became so interested in cricket that they convinced club officials to sod their cricket ground with turf imported from England and had the name of the club changed to the Seabright Lawn Tennis and Cricket Club in 1885.
Nowhere was this new trend in cricket more evident than in Philadelphia. In 1865 a group of young people in that city founded the Merion Cricket Club. They were very emphatic about the purity of the sport and thwarted early attempts by some to convert the club into baseball club. In the end, the club members passed a resolution that the remaining baseball equipment "be sold off as quickly as possible" to guarantee the purpose of the club. Following the lead of New York and Philadelphia, other cities saw new clubs form. These included St Louis, Boston, Detroit, and Baltimore.
These decades also saw an increase in cricket-playing at the intercollegiate level. Following the Civil War, it looked like cricket might expand beyond its strongholds at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania. Members of these schools joined together with delegates from other collegiate cricket clubs, including Harvard University, Columbia University, and Princeton University, to form the Intercollegiate Cricket Association in 1881. The group was plagued by troubles and withdrawals. Other schools, such as Cornell University, joined the ICA, but Yale University and Johns Hopkins University never got around to fielding a team. The ICA it lasted until 1924 when it crowned its last champion. These collegiate clubs generally drew their talent from pools at secondary schools which also fielded team and played in interscholastic competitions in this period.
Read more about this topic: History Of United States Cricket
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—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.”
—Freya Stark (1893–1993)
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)