In Mobile in 1860

Pre-pro Baseball

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Date of Game	1861 date is inferred
Location	Mobile, AL, United States
Modern Address
Field	Add Field Page Spring Hill College
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NY Rules	Unknown
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Description	Alabama was reportedly the original source of Cuban baseball. "Baseball thus appeared in Cuba as early as the end of the U.S. Civil War and was thriving there only a few years later. Bats, balls, leather gloves, and rules for playing the new North American pastime were first carried to Havana by a pair of brothers, Nemesio and Ernesto Guillo . . . when the teenagers returned from a half-decade of high schooling at Alabama's Spring Hill College in 1864. Within mere days they were organizing rudimentary contests . . . in downtown Havana. Less than four years later, the Guillo brothers . . . had formed the Havana Base Ball Club." Spring Hill College is in western Mobile AL, which is on the Gulf of Mexico and near the Mississippi border. It is a Jesuit institution and was established in 1830. Mobile's population was about 29,000 in 1860, making it the 4th largest CSA city and the 27th largest in the US. Mobile's cotton exports were second only to New Orleans in the 1840s. OPEN ISSUE [1]: Does the Diaro article elaborate on the play, and the rules of play, used at the Alabama school? Can we ascertain when and how organized ballplaying, either the New York game or other forms, arrived at the school? OPEN ISSUE [2]: Civil War historian Bruce Allardice points out that ballplaying at Spring Hill may have occurred in 1861 or so, rather than in 1864, as most southern academies lost both their students and faculties to the War and closed for its duration. Also, that Spring Hill College was a favorite place for New Orleans Catholics to send their sons, and as we know baseball was being played in New Orleans prior to 1860.
Sources	Peter C. Bjarkman, Diamonds Around the Globe (Greenwood Press, 2005), page 2. A key source for this story is an interview with one of the brothers in Diaro de la Marina, January 6, 1924.
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Entry Origin	Sabrpedia
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