Cricket in America's Golden Age — Philadelphia and the Game's US Peak, 1840s

The 1844 Canada v USA match, attended by some of the largest crowds in American sport at that point, demonstrated that the game had genuine mass appeal. The failure to convert this into lasting popular interest is one of sporting history's great might-have-beens.

American cricket's strength in the 1840s was concentrated in Philadelphia, where the Germantown Cricket Club (founded in 1854 but succeeding earlier clubs) and its predecessors sustained a first-class cricket culture. The game had arrived with British immigrants in the 1820s and 1830s and found a ready audience among the merchant class of the eastern seaboard cities. By the 1840s Philadelphia had a dozen active clubs; New York and Boston had several each. The international match against Canada in 1844 — the first international in any team sport — drew an estimated 5,000 spectators and demonstrated that American cricket could attract serious public attention. The game was played at roughly the same standard as English county cricket; several American cricketers of this period could have competed in England. What the game lacked was a mass following below the merchant class: it remained socially selective and expensive at a time when the new urban working class was gravitating toward baseball. The Civil War of 1861–65, which devastated the cricket-playing generation, was the decisive blow.