While I'm largely focused on early baseball in St. Louis, I do have a great interest in the bigger picture and, specifically, I'm interested in the evolution, development, and spread of ball games in the Trans-Appalachian West. While this site is largely focused on the happenings in St. Louis, I do, from time to time, like to share some of the stuff I find about what's going on in the greater region. What I really like is finding stuff from places where I've been or places that I know about. I live right across the river from St. Louis, in Illinois, and I love discovering the obscure history of early baseball in my native state.
Here, we find a reference to a game, from the August 1, 1868, issue of the Clipper, about a game played in Quincy, Illinois. Quincy is about a hundred miles or so upriver from St. Louis and I think that the evolution of the game in that city is important because it illustrates baseball development in not just Illinois, but also in Missouri and Iowa, as the city sits rather near to the confluence of the three states. Also involved in this game was a club from Monmouth, Illinois, which I know very little about. If I had to bet, I'd say that there was a railroad line that ran from Quincy to or through Monmouth and that's what brought the two clubs together.
This is not, interestingly, the first reference to a game in Quincy that I have in my notes. The earliest known game in Quincy comes from a July 24, 1866, issue of the Quincy Daily Herald:
Here, we find a reference to a game, from the August 1, 1868, issue of the Clipper, about a game played in Quincy, Illinois. Quincy is about a hundred miles or so upriver from St. Louis and I think that the evolution of the game in that city is important because it illustrates baseball development in not just Illinois, but also in Missouri and Iowa, as the city sits rather near to the confluence of the three states. Also involved in this game was a club from Monmouth, Illinois, which I know very little about. If I had to bet, I'd say that there was a railroad line that ran from Quincy to or through Monmouth and that's what brought the two clubs together.
This is not, interestingly, the first reference to a game in Quincy that I have in my notes. The earliest known game in Quincy comes from a July 24, 1866, issue of the Quincy Daily Herald:
The first game of Base Ball ever played according to regulations in our city, came off yesterday at Alstyne's Prairie, before a large crowd of spectators. Great interest was manifested by all present in the exciting sport and the "boys" played remarkably well considering that this was their "first appearance in public." A few more such games as we had yesterday and the "championship" will be Quincy's.
At the old site, I wrote the following about this early reference to baseball in Quincy:
This small blurb in the Quincy paper helps illuminate the process by which baseball spread in the Illinois/Missouri/Iowa region. Quincy, Illinois, which sits on the Mississippi River not too far south of where the three states meet, was founded in 1818 and, geographically, lies within the boarders of a west-central Illinois region that had an active, documented town-ball culture in the early and mid 19th century. There is enough evidence to support the idea that St. Louis shared in that ball-playing culture, prior to the arrival of the Regulation Game in the area in the late 1850s.
What appears evident to me is that, at least in this area of the United States, the evolutionary spread of the New York game of baseball took place in two steps. The first took place prior to the Civil War, when the game reached the larger cities of Illinois, Missouri and Iowa. The second took place after the war, when the game began to spread beyond the big cities and reached smaller towns such as Quincy. I believe that this is evidence that the war hindered the development and spread of baseball, rather than that the war was a factor in the spread of the game to places like Quincy. If not for the extreme disruption of life that the war brought, I believe that the game would have spread to the smaller towns in the area in the early 1860s rather then in the immediate post-war era. If not for the war, Quincy probably would have had their first baseball clubs in 1860 or 1861 rather than in 1866.
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