William Bayard Sr. had lost his lot. The wealthy New York merchant had been part of the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 and even joined the Sons of Liberty. But the push for independence was too much, and Bayard sided with the Loyalists in 1776. For this, his lands across the Hudson River from Manhattan were confiscated. With the War for Independence over, Bayard’s confiscated property was auctioned off in 1784. Col. John Stevens offered 18,360 pounds sterling for Bayard’s 564-acre lot and an additional 125 acres. Four years later, Stevens purchased another 125 acres along the Hudson in Weehawken.
John Stevens by an unidentified artist, circa 1830, oil on canvas, from the National Portrait Gallery. Public Domain
Stevens had big plans for his one-mile-plus long riverfront property, especially the 689 acres he called Hoboken. New York City’s population was booming. Between 1790 and 1800, the population had nearly doubled from 33,131 to 60,515, and the trend would only increase. With this boom came the demand for business and housing construction. New York citizens were living in an atmosphere of brick and mortar, and Stevens understood that New Yorkers wished to get away from the hustle and bustle of the big city.
Developing Hoboken
In 1804, Stevens began a 30-year construction project for Hoboken that would not be a reflection of Manhattan, although the area would be broken up into 800 lots with crisscrossing streets. Rather the vision was a quaint and uncongested new town, which would include a vast park that embraced the natural surroundings and emulated the style of the English landscape garden. The park would be called Elysian Fields.Along the property was a high point that locals had long admired, even going back to the time of Henry Hudson’s travels. On this point Stevens had his home, Castle Point Mansion, constructed. During the Polish statesman Julian U. Niemcewicz’s second visit to America in 1806, he noted in his diary that Stevens’s mansion “stands on a promontory in one of the most beautiful situations in the world, dominating the town, the river, the harbor and the sea.”
An 1808 engraving of John Stevens's estate, Castle Point, Hoboken. Currently the site of Stevens Institute of Technology. Public Domain
This beautiful situation may have been the literal high point of Hoboken, but the most memorable would be Elysian Fields and, more specifically, what took place there 40 years after Niemcewicz visited.
A New Game
The young country of America had adopted many of the games played by its European forebears, like cricket, polo, and yachting—in fact, Stevens’s son, John Cox Stevens, founded the New York Yacht Club. There were also the games of three-cornered cat, town ball, and rounders; the latter originated in England. Town ball was played throughout the U.S. regions, in places like New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and several towns in Massachusetts; and, much like the varied areas, the rules and regulations of the game varied accordingly.In New York City, a new game was coming into form. The players and organizers of this new game adopted many of the rules from town ball and rounders, and began using an antiquated English name for the game: base ball.
By the 1830s, many Americans had tired of European sports. In an 1887 interview for San Francisco’s Daily Examiner entitled “How Baseball Began—A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It,” William Wheaton, one of the early founders of base ball, recalled that he and his friends considered cricket too slow. They considered three-cornered cat too childish, and also too dangerous for grown men to play “because the ball was made of a hard rubber center, tightly wrapped with yarn, and in the hands of a strong-armed man it was a terrible missile, and sometimes had fatal results when it came in contact with a delicate part of the player’s anatomy.
“We had to have a good outdoor game, and as the games then in vogue didn’t suit us, we decided to remodel three-cornered cat and make a new game. We first organized what we called the Gotham Baseball Club. This was the first ball organization in the United States, and it was completed in 1837.”
Soon, base ball clubs in New York began forming. There was Wheaton’s Gotham Base Ball Club (at times called the Washingtons), the New York Base Ball Club, the Eagle, and the Knickerbocker—the latter forming in 1845. The growth of New York’s population seemed to work in tandem with the growth of these new base ball clubs. While they did play in New York, there was another location where these men enjoyed playing, and John Stevens had made it easy to reach.
An Entertaining Place
Visitors from New York arriving at the Elysian Fields on the Hoboken Ferry, 1856. Leslie's Weekly. Public Domain
Part of Hoboken’s development was Stevens’s ferry system; it ferried New Yorkers to and from the new city. His ferries docked at what Stevens called the Green. Visitors didn’t have far to go for entertainment once arriving in Hoboken. Near the Green, Stevens installed a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, wax figures, a Camera Obscura, and the Whirligig—a kind of flying contraption on poles. In 1825, at 76 years old, Stevens oversaw the construction of what became America’s first steam locomotive. This “carriage on railways” moved in a 200-foot circle at six miles per hour. In 1831, Stevens had the Colonnade Hotel built for visitors who wished to remain in Hoboken for more than a day.
Hoboken had become the place to be, not only for entertainment options, of which there were plenty, or to get away from the city, but also to enjoy cooler temperatures. As one British visitor recalled, comparing the summer heat of Manhattan and Stevens’s new town, “The heat of the weather in the city is so oppressive to English constitutions, that we have established ourselves across the river, on the Jersey shore, at a very pleasant place called Hoboken.”
Stevens had spared no expense removing trees, laying roads, building hotels and his mansion, developing a ferry system, as well as offering concessions, games, and rides. Importantly, he had also developed large open green spaces for games like town ball, three-cornered cat, cricket, and the new game called base ball.
Setting the Rules
A young New York banker and volunteer fireman, Alexander Cartwright Jr., enjoyed this new game of base ball. He and his fellow firemen of the Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 12 often played, like other locals did, along streets or in vacant lots. When the Engine Company disbanded in 1843, the fellow firefighters continued playing ball together and formed the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club. The club also found a new place to play: Elysian Fields.
The New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club, circa 1847. Cartwright at the top middle, and Wheaton on the top right. Cartwright's identification has been disputed. Public Domain
The team finally decided on Sept. 23, 1845, to establish the “Rules and Regulations of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club.” These 20 specific rules, considered the precursor to America’s modern game of baseball, included some of the most important rules of the game, like the introduction of boundaries and, therefore, foul balls; three strikes and the batter is out; a batter is out by being tagged or the “adversary” reaching the specific base with the ball first; for the protection of the players “in no instance is a ball to be thrown at him”; and after three outs the side is retired.
As far as how many players there were on the Knickerbocker club, one can only guess, though their interclub games were played with as few as seven and as many as 11 on each side. As the cool spring of 1846 gave way to the summer heat, the Knickerbockers decided to make their way across the Hudson River to Elysian Fields. They were not, however, ferrying alone. The New York Base Ball Club joined them.
The First Organized Match?
According to a plaque in Hoboken commemorating the moment, it was during this week in history, “on June 19, 1846 [that] the first match game of baseball was played here on the Elysian Fields between the Knickerbockers and the New Yorks. It is generally conceded that until this time the game was not seriously regarded.” The New Yorks defeated the Knickerbockers 23-1 with Cartwright assuming the role of umpire.Was this actually the first organized baseball game between two separate clubs? It appears that may not be the case. At the New York Public Library, John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, discovered scoring results from October 1845, shortly after the Knickerbocker Rules were set, that represent two competing teams. Regarding the beginning of baseball in America, there is evidence of the game possibly being played in 1791 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
Baseball has been built on folklore and the reminiscences of old men, like Wheaton and Cartwright. This has led to many assumptions, misremembrances, and errors concerning the game’s history, none more glaring than Cooperstown, New York, being called the “birthplace of baseball” and Abner Doubleday, a Civil War general, being considered the game’s founder. Both assumptions have long been debunked. Yet the place in the game’s history for Cartwright, the Knickerbockers, and the New Yorks are, nonetheless, pivotal.
As far as Elysian Fields, it became the home for the boys of summer for the next two decades. The location and the game are etched into history via scorecards, memories, newspaper articles, magazines, and even a Currier & Ives lithograph of the 1865 championship between the Mutual Club of Manhattan and the Atlantic Club of Brooklyn, which was played before approximately 20,000 spectators.
Not only does the lithograph prove that Elysian Fields was a quasi-precursor to the ballparks of today, but the image thoroughly illustrates a modern similarity. Considering Elysian Fields stems from Greek mythology, perhaps it is only fitting that baseball’s origin is wrapped in American mythology.
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