Early Recorded Baseball Game
The earliest known reference to baseball is in a 1744 British children's publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, by John Newbery. It contains a rhymed description of "base-ball" and a woodcut that shows a field set-up somewhat similar to the modern game—though in a triangular rather than diamond configuration, and with posts instead of ground-level bases. Block discovered that the first recorded game of "Base-Ball" took place in 1749 in Surrey, and featured the Prince of Wales as a player. William Bray, an English lawyer, recorded a game of baseball on Easter Monday 1755 in Guildford, Surrey. This early form of the game was apparently brought to Canada by English immigrants. Rounders was also brought to the United States by Canadians of both British and Irish ancestry. The first known American reference to baseball appears in a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts town bylaw prohibiting the playing of the game near the town's new meeting house. By 1796, a version of the game was well known enough to earn a mention in a German scholar's book on popular pastimes. As described by Johann Gutsmuths, "englische Base-ball" involved a contest between two teams, in which "the batter has three attempts to hit the ball while at the home plate." Only one out was required to retire a side.
In 1828, William Clarke in London published the second edition of The Boy's Own Book, which included the rules of rounders and contained the first printed description in English of a bat and ball base-running game played on a diamond. The following year, the book was published in Boston, Massachusetts.
By the early 1830s, there were reports of a variety of uncodified bat-and-ball games recognizable as early forms of baseball being played around North America. These games were often referred to locally as "town ball", though other names such as "round-ball" and "base-ball" were also used. Among the earliest examples to receive a detailed description—albeit five decades after the fact, in a letter from an attendee to Sporting Life magazine—took place in Beachville, Ontario, in 1838.
On June 4, 1838 two teams from Oxford and Zorra townships did battle in Beachville, Ontario in what’s now recognized as one of the first documented game in North American history. It was Dr. Adam Ford, a former resident of St. Marys, Ont., now home to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, who later recounted details of this contest in a letter published in the May 5, 1886 issue of Sporting Life magazine.
Living in Denver, Colo., when he penned his recollections, Ford recalls that the match was played on a square field in a pasture. The competition between Beachville and Zorra featured five bases, fair and foul balls, players employing a hand hewn stick as a bat and a ball made of twisted yarn and covered with calf skin. The Beachville District Historical Society has researched Ford’s account and has concluded that the information in his letter is authentic.
The following are the names of the players on the Beachville and Zorra teams that participated in the historic game:
George Burdick Harry Karn
Almon Burch Peter Karn
Gordon Cook Reuben Martin
Henry Cruttendon Edward McNames
William Dodge Nathaniel McNames
Old Ned Dolson Neil McTaggart
William Ford James Piper
William Harrington Henry Taylor
William Hutchinson I. Van Alstine
Adam Karn Abel Williams
Daniel Karn John Williams
