Many a broken window in Main Street the Anson family were responsible for in those days, but as all the owners of stores on that thoroughfare in the immediate vicinity of the grounds were base-ball enthusiasts, broken windows counted for but little so long as Marshalltown carried off the honors. CHAPTER III. SOME FACTS ABOUT THE NATIONAL GAME. Just at what particular time the base-ball fever became epidemic in Marshalltown it is difficult to say, for the reason that, unfortunately, all of the records of the game there, together with the trophies accumulated, were destroyed by a fire that swept the place in 1897, and that also destroyed all of the files of the newspapers then published there. The fever had been raging in the East many years previous to that time, however, and had gradually worked its way over the mountains and across the broad prairies until the sport had obtained a foothold in every little village and hamlet in the land. Before entering further on my experience it may be well to give here and now a brief history of the game and its origin. When and where the game first made its appearance is a matter of great uncertainty, but the general opinion of the historians seems to be that by some mysterious process of evolution it developed from the boys' game of more than a century ago, then known as "one old cat," in which there was a pitcher, a catcher, and a batter. John M. Ward, a famous base-ball player in his day, and now a prosperous lawyer in the city of Brooklyn, and the late Professor Proctor, carried on a controversy through the columns of the New York newspapers in 1888, the latter claiming that base-ball was taken from the old English game of "rounders," while Ward argued that base-ball was evolved from the boys' game, as above stated, and was distinctly an American game, he plainly proving that it had no connection whatever with "rounders." The game of base-ball probably owed its name to the fact that bases were used in making its runs, and were one of its prominent features. There seems to be no doubt that the game was played in the United States as early at least as the beginning of the present century, for Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared a few years ago that base-ball was one of the sports of his college days, and the autocrat of the breakfast table graduated at Harvard in 1829. Along in 1842 a number of gentlemen, residents of New York City, were in the habit of playing the game as a means of exercise on the vacant lot at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, where Madison Square Garden now stands. In 1845 they formed themselves into a permanent organization known as the Knickerbocker Club, and drew up the first code of playing rules of the game, which were very simple as compared with the complex rules which govern the game of the present time, and which are certainly changed in such a way as to keep one busy in keeping track of them.