Introducing "1867 - A Season Like No Other: Tennesseans Catch the Base Ball Fever"

Cumberland Club of Nashville, Lookout Mountain (1866)

Tennessee's baseball roots can be traced back to the eve of the American Civil War. The "New York Game," which originated on vacant lots in both Manhattan and Brooklyn in the early to mid-1840s, soon became the game codified by "base ball" (predominately spelled as two words in the nineteenth century) clubs throughout the United States. Transplanted New Yorkers brought their form of the game with them as they trekked across the nation, settling in the Midwest, along the West coast in California, and into the Upper and Deep South. As the Election of 1860 sprung into high gear, some of these Yankees called on local Nashvillians and Memphians to turn out for a practice so they could see the game in action and learn its rules.  

According to the July 25, 1860 issue of the Republican Banner, "a party" of young men were engaged in the sport of base ball on the east or Edgefield side of the Cumberland River. The Banner's editor noted that the "early closing of the stores gives fine opportunity to the young men engaged in mercantile pursuits . . . . Let us have Base Ball Clubs organized, then, and the fun commenced." 

Much like origins of the game in New York, the first members of antebellum base ball clubs tended to be white males in their twenties and thirties, those who belonged to the professional working class, rather than those of the upper or lowest classes of society. In time, however, other clubs consisting of various classes, ages, and races appeared in these same locations, but they tended to play among themselves. That facet of amateur base ball held true through the end of the Civil War and into the first couple years of Reconstruction before the game evolved from an amateur to a professional game. Still, wherever base ball was first organized, even in the immediate post-Civil War years in the South, one typically sees evidence of the game being first organized by city and town elites, before they were soon followed by scores of other non-elite clubs. This pattern, which characterized the amateur era of base ball, rings true in Tennessee. Base ball stood poised to become the national game - and then the war came. 

Though the American Civil War rendered base ball temporarily dormant in Tennessee, the game was played by both Union and Rebel soldiers on their battlefield encampments and defensive coastal fortifications, as well as within the walls of their prisoner of war camps. Its exposure to hundreds of thousands of young soldiers was a contributing factor to base ball's evolution to a national game at war's end. As Tennesseans gradually put their lives and communities back to together in the spring and summer of 1865, base ball suddenly reappeared with two clubs in Memphis (April 1865) and the following year with several in Nashville (April 1866). As 1866 dawned, Chattanooga had two clubs - the Mountain City Club and the Lightfoot Club. 

A similar pattern emerged in cities and towns across the nation in the first year and a half following the end of the war. According to the Daily National Intelligencer, the game became "a perfect mania" in which almost every person "of the masculine persuasion, irrespective of age, station, or condition, has . . . an attack of the base ball fever." Four long years in military service had made young men "wonderfully gregarious" and eager to socialize through team sports. Scores of base ball clubs sprung up in urban and rural areas. By the close of 1866, there were base ball clubs not only in Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga, but also in Sewanee, Tazewell, and several other small towns across the Volunteer state. Tennessee's urban base ball clubs even began barnstorming tours across the state to identify a championship club - the Cumberland Club of Nashville, the Lightfoot Club, and the Mountain City Club each claimed to be the rightful state champions. The heir to the state title would be bestowed on the Mountain City Club in the spring of 1867 with the establishment of the Tennessee Base Ball Association (TBBA). At that first meeting, representatives from ten clubs across the state came together to approve a constitution and by-laws, before adopting the 1866 National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) rules and regulations for their games. 

This blog post introduces a new series "1867 - A Season Like No Other: Tennesseans Catch the Base Ball Fever" that will document the story of the year when Tennesseans, from East Tennessee to West Tennessee, adopted the national game and gradually began its transformation from an amateur game to a professonal one. The 1867 season will unfold over the course of the spring and summer of 2026 in weekly posts, as well as some targeted dates designed to coincide with the celebration of a significant anniversary - first club meetings; first and significant games; painful, "career-ending" injuries incurred in baseball's “garden of eden”; and much more. Its main focus will be the Knoxville Knoxvilles, as these blog posts will shed new light on the Queen City of the Mountain's first base ball club, which is being resurrected in 2026 with the Knoxville Knoxvilles Vintage Base Ball Club. Along the way, we will meet the club's original baseballists, their intracity and state rivals, and we will demonstrate how the sport developed in the post-Civil War South and rapidly evolved from a regional folk game played by amateurs more interested in social fraternization and recreational exercise into a modern, commercialized professional spectator sport. Come along as we begin the first post tomorrow, Sunday, March 8, with the account of a tragic, natural disaster that marked the first discussions of playing base ball in Knoxville.