Tradition carries us back as far as the year 1831 or 1832, when cricket was first played on the ground of George Ticknor, Esq., west of the old bridge below Fairmount, by a few Englishmen, who shortly afterward organized themselves under the name of the Union Club. Some of our older native cricketers remember taking their first lessons from the three brothers, George, Prior and John Ticknor, who, with Joseph Nicholls, William Richardson, John M. Fisher, John Herrod, George Parker, Samuel Dingworth, Jonathan Ainsworth, John Kenworthy and George Daffin, met on Saturday afternoons and holidays. In subsequent years a few enthusiastic spirits practiced with home-made bats on the Camden common, and thence we trace the feeble but growing interest in the game, until in 1854 the Philadelphia Cricket Club was organized, with J. Dickinson Sergeant (who still fills the office) as president, William Rotch Wister as secretary, and Hartman Kuhn (third), James B. England, Morton P. Henry, Thomas Hall, Thomas Facon, Dr. Samuel Lewis, William M. Bradshaw, Henry M. Barlow, R. Darrell Stewart, S. Weir Mitchell and (last, but not least) Tom Senior among its founders. Then came the Germantown Club, of native American boys, organized in 1855, whose highest ambition, for many years, was to play the Philadelphia Club, "barring Tom Senior," then the only fast round-arm bowler in the country. Next came the Olympian, the Delphian, the Keystone Cricket Clubs, and a host of lesser lights, whose head-quarters were at West Philadelphia; and soon after the now famous Young America Cricket Club was formed by the lamented Walter S. Newhall, partly as a training-club for the Germantown. Well did it fulfill its purpose until the breaking out of the war, when the members of the Germantown Club changed the bat for the sabre almost in a body, and the club went out of existence. With calmer times the old love of cricket came back, and through the energy of Mr. Charles E. Cadwalader the Germantown Club was reorganized, and the _esprit de corps_ was such that before the club had taken the field the roll showed more than twice its former numbers. Through the spirit of its patrons, and especially by the kindness of H. Pratt McKean, Esq. (part of whose country-seat was tendered for a cricket-ground), the new life of the Germantown Cricket Club was successfully inaugurated on the 17th of October, 1866, by a victory in its opening match with the St. George Club of New York. That was a red-letter day, when Major-General Meade, on behalf of the ladies of Germantown, and amid the huzzas of thousands of its friends, presented to the club a handsome set of colors, and, hoisting them to the breeze, alluded in his own graceful style to the memories of the past, and the achievements which he predicted the future would witness on this magnificent cricket-field.