What are your baseball origins? Where did you play your first game? Baseball traces its roots through the annals of history, well before the founding of Major League Baseball. This chronology, from Protoball (an extensive gathering of early materials documenting the origins of baseball), records the order of events related to the development of baseball starting in 2500 B.C. Enjoy, and share with us your own baseball milestones.
"Monday [June] 26th. I breakfasted at this place. In Harmony there are about 900 souls. They make no pretensions to religion . . . . I shall only add, that Sunday is a holiday, they have two public balls a week, one every Tuesday and every Saturday night, that the men played ball all yesterday afternoon, that their cornfields and vineyards are overrun with weeds, their school children are half of the time out of school."
"Extract from the Correspondence of a Young Gentleman Traveling in he Western States," American Advocate, September 9, 1826. The location was New Harmony IN, a settlement organized by the utopian thinker Robert Owen in 1824. New Harmony is near the southern tip of IN, and is on the Wabash River, about 130 miles east of St. Louis and about 120 miles east of Louisville KY. Accessed by subscription search May 20, 2009.
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Note: ID numbers for milestone entries include the (often approximated) year of the observation, followed by serial number reflecting the order it was added. A date is approximated when an ID is denoted with a "C".
