Despite the myth that baseball sprang solely from the mind of Abner Doubleday in 1839, a game called baseball was around more than a hundred years earlier. Primarily a game for men, accounts of a game with a bat and ball have been traced to American soldiers at Valley Forge in 1776 and the campus if Princeton in 1787, where it was banned by faculty.

 

Widespread popularity of Baseball, however, did not come about until the mid-19th century, much in part due to a group of young professionals whp began meeting regularly to play baseball on a field at 47th Avenue and 27th Street in Manhattan in 1842. Three years later the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club was formed. On October 7th of 1842 the members of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club took part in the first recorded game in history at Elysian Fields in Hobken, New Jersey. As a result of the Knickerbocker Baseball Club new clubs in and around New York City began to form. In 1857, 22 clubs met and formed the National Association of Baseball Players and set the rules by which the Associations players would play the game by, which became Baseball's first formal rules.

By 1867 there where over 300 member clubs of the National Association of Baseball Players. In Middlebury on January 19th of 1867, the Fearnaught Base Ball Club was formed. Consisting of 14 founding members the Fearnaught Base Ball Club, like the many other clubs across the nation, became an important aspect of leisure life for the men of Middlebury and surrounding towns.