Before the Chicago Cubs: Baseball Comes to the Windy City

The McHenry County Historical Society & Museum presents “Before the Chicago Cubs: Baseball Comes to the Windy City” at 6:30 p.m. Monday, April 10, 2023 in the Willow Room of the Huntley Park District REC Center, 12015 Mill St. in Huntley. Professor Bruce Allardice, past president of the Northern Illinois Civil War Round Table and the Civil War Round Table of Chicago, has authored or coauthored six books, and numerous articles, on the Civil War. He also is an avid sports historian who currently heads up the Civil War Baseball subcommittee of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) and is a member of SABR's Biography Committee, specializing in researching the lives of 19th Century ballplayers.

Allardice's ground-breaking work on the early spread of baseball, done at the request of Major League Baseball, can be found at http://www.protoball.org, the "pre-pro baseball" link. He's also coauthored two articles on Civil War baseball published in the journal Base Ball and is currently newsletter editor of the SABR Origins of Baseball Newsletter. Project Protoball was conceived about ten years ago when it became clear that interesting new finds were still being added to our store of knowledge about the origins of what was then called “base ball.” He also will discuss early (pre-1870) base ball in McHenry County.

Admission is $8 for Society members, $10 for nonmembers. Tickets are available by clicking HERE.

For more information, visit GotHistory.org.