Baseball evolved from a number of different ball-and-stick games (paddle ball, trap ball, one-old-cat, rounders, and town ball) originating in England. As early as the American Revolution, it was noted that troops played “base ball” in their free time. In 1845 Alexander Cartwright formalized the New York Knickerbockers’ version of the game: a diamond shaped infield, with bases ninety feet apart, three strikes-you’re-out, batter out on a caught ball, three outs per inning,. | At the turn of the nineteenth century, Concord was a thriving community, already famous throughout the young nation for its critical early role in the events leading up to the American Revolution. It was the half shire town for Middlesex County, attracting over 500 visitors to the courts twice a year, among them customers for Concord’s hats, shoes, carriages and clocks. Among Concord’s approximately 400 heads of households in this period, about 65% were in agriculture, 4% in commerce, and 35% in manufacturing. Of those in manufacturing, seven men headed clockmaking shops and another thirty or so were engaged in the shops or in businesses that supplied the clockmaking trade – the brass foundry, iron forge, wire-drawing mill, and a number of cabinetmaking shops. In short, the center of Concord, the Milldam, was a machine for the production of clocks, second only in importance to Boston’s industrial Roxbury Neck, where the influential Willard family had been producing clocks since about 1785.
