Town Ball in The West
- In Cincinnati, Ohio the informal Excelsior Townball Club was formed in 1860; the players were young schoolteachers and their friends, and hospital interns. Reportedly they used a small bat which was swung with one hand, in games of four innings, with 10 to 15 players on a side. The more formal Cincinnati Buckeye Townball Club was established on 1863.
- Indiana Author Edward Eggleston remembers a pre-Civil War schoolyard game:
Town-ball is one of the old games from which the scientific but not half so amusing "national game" of base-ball has since been evolved. In that day the national game was not thought of. Eastern boys played field-base, and Western boys town-ball in a free and happy way, with soft balls, primitive bats, and no nonsense. There were no scores, but a catch or a cross-out in town-ball put the whole side out, leaving others to take the bat or "paddle" as it was appropriately called. — Scribner's Monthly, March 1879
- The town of Canton, Illinois was incorporated in 1837. At the first meeting of the town trustees (aldermen), 27 March 1837, Section 36 of the Ordinances was enacted: "any person who shall on the Sabbath day play at bandy, cricket, cat, town-ball, corner-ball, over-ball, fives, or any other game of ball, within the limits of the corporation, or shall engage in pitching dollars or quarters, or any other game, in any public place, shall, on conviction thereof, be fined the sum of one dollar."
- Henry J. Philpott described himself as "a pupil and teacher in country schools within twenty miles of the Mississippi River, and about half-way between St. Louis and St. Paul." He wrote a story called "A Little Boys' Game with a Ball" for Popular Science Monthly in 1890. Philpott writes that the boys played Old Cat until they had more than eight players; then they switched to town-ball. "In 'town-ball' there was as yet no distinction between base-men and fielders. After the pitcher and catcher had been selected, the others on that side went where they pleased; and they did not get to bat until they had put all the batters out." He writes that after baseball was introduced, town-ball "was so different that for some years the two games were played side by side, each retaining its own name."
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Famous quotes containing the words town, ball and/or west:
“Mr. Mum’s Rudesheimer
And the church of St. Geryon
Are the two things alone
That deserve to be known
In the body-and-soul-stinking town of Cologne.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Will TV kill the theater? If the programs I have seen, save for “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” the ball games and the fights, are any criterion, the theater need not wake up in a cold sweat.”
—Tallulah Bankhead (1903–1968)
“There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)