George Parr's Final Season — The Lion of the North Retires, 1869

Parr's 1869 retirement coincided with the emergence of the county championship as an organised competition — he helped design the structure he would not play in. His Trent Bridge elm lived until 1976.

Parr had been England's best batsman from the mid-1850s, when he inherited the crown from Fuller Pilch, until the late 1860s, when W.G. Grace's emergence made all comparisons redundant. Through those fifteen years he had scored prolifically in county cricket, captained the All-England Eleven after William Clarke's death in 1856, led two tours to Australia and New Zealand (1863–64) and one to North America (1859), and remained the central figure in English professional cricket's organisation. By 1869 he was 43 and the leg-side brilliance that had made the Parr Tree at Trent Bridge famous — he had hit the branches of a particular elm so often in six-hitting that it was named after him — had faded. He played his last first-class match for Nottinghamshire and retired quietly, continuing in cricket administration. W.G. Grace's 1871 season — 2,739 runs at 78.25 — demonstrated definitively that a new era had begun.

Parr remained involved in Nottinghamshire cricket administration and was a respected figure in the emerging county championship structure. He died in 1891.