1729.1

At Harvard, Batt and Ball "Stirs Our Bloud Greatly"

Salience	Noteworthy
Tags	College, Harvard CollegeCollege, Harvard College
Location
City/State/Country:	Cambridge, MA, US
Modern Address
Game	Bat and BallBat and Ball
Immediacy of Report	Contemporary
Age of Players	YouthYouth
Holiday
Notables
Text	At Harvard, 1729, in a letter dated March 30 from John Seccomb to Nicholas Gilman: “The Batchelors Play Batt & Ball mightily now adays which Stirs our bloud greatly”
Sources	Nicholas Gilman papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, as cited in New England Life in the Eighteenth Century (Clifford K. Shipton, 1995), p. 287.
Warning
Comment	Brian Turner notes that this find "pushes back the earliest reference to bat & ball, banned in Salem in the 1760s (see 1762.2, by 30-odd years. And it came more than two decades before a reference in a 1750s French & Indian war diary of Benjamin Glazier of Ipswich." Gilman was from a leading family of New Hampshire, mainly centered in Exeter, a bit inland from Portsmouth, where Elwyn gave a description of 1810's "bat & ball," in which he certainly seems to name a specific game. Seccomb, also spelled Seccomb, was born and lived in Medford, Mass., and later in life wound up in Nova Scotia -- not because he was a Loyalist but for other reasons. Edit with form to add a comment
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Source Image	[[Image:\|left\|thumb]]
External Number
Submitted by	Brian Turner
Submission Note	Email of 8/30/2014
Has Supplemental Text

Comments