Baseball’s True Birthplace Turns 200
Cooperstown is a rich man’s lie
Hamden NY is the birthplace of baseball, or ‘bass-ball’
Go ask 100-year-old Alice Blackman on July 13 as she glides past the down-staters in a ’57 Chevy convertible
In the July 13, 1825, edition of the Delhi Gazette, nine residents of the newly established town of Hamden, New York, issued a challenge to an “equal number of persons” from any town in Delaware County: 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.” The ad was dated the day before, and signed by the two Chase brothers, Eli Bagley, Ira and Walter Peak, H.B. Gondrich, R.F. Thurber, Asa C. Howland, and M.L. Bostwick. There is no evidence that the challenge was taken up, but the ad appeared again a week later, and a gloveless game involving wooden bats and bases is held to have been played in the region at the time. There is currently no known earlier mention in print of a baseball game on American soil. The challengers included the local innkeeper, a town clerk, and other documented representatives of this bucolic one-road hamlet along the West Branch of the Delaware River, and it’s fair to …