The Brooklyn Trolley Blogger: Green-Wood Cemetery III

Like I always say, all this research has been done already. I am just showing you around. So.., anyone care for another trip back to Green-Wood?

( View from a Green Wood hill top. Click...Empire St. Bldg is center mass of pic)

I've found myself talking out loud to the stones. I can't help but express aloud what we all feel when I've visited these sights; "Thank You Sir! Thank You for this great game of Baseball." Two pats and a rub of the stone has become my new custom when I leave them and they return to their eternal slumbers.

Before there was a Cooperstown HOF, there was Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Today we visit Duncan Curry, the first President of the Knickerbocker Baseball Club of New York.
The Knickerbockers of the early 1840's were already formed into a local athletic club participating in and promoting outdoor athletics on Manhattan's east side Murray Hill neighborhood. But in 1846, Duncan Curry said in response to a debate as to whether he or Henry Chadwick was the "Father of Baseball", - "Thomas Fiddlesticks.[Chadwick] had no more to do with the original rules (of Baseball) than you had. William Wheaton, William H. Tucker and I drew up the first set of rules and the game was developed by the people who played it and were connected with it."

The rules Duncan Curry speaks of are those so famously drafted in the east side Knickerbocker Club House 164 years ago and define our Pastime today. They are the rules that accompanied the team to Hoboken and the Elysian Fields of play. It was in Hoboken, N.J. where the first organized game of baseball was played by the first officially chartered Baseball team ever formed* under rules of "the New York Game". That's the way we understand it...right folks?

Duncan Curry served as club President in 1845 and 1846. He remained with the club as a player and later followed other baseball related endeavours as well.

Both Henry Chadwick and Duncan Curry are deserving of respect for inspiring the game and fathering Baseball. There are others however. We all have an understanding Baseball was more a creation of evolution than just one man's invention. Town Ball and Rounders were contemporaries of our game. Many people and circumstances contributed to the resilient game that won our hearts. Let us pay respects to one of those individuals. Ladies and gentlemen, one of the Fathers of Baseball, Duncan Curry.