It is a small, haunted town resting under the shadows of three-storey buildings that for their time were the flexing bicep of American industrial innovation. This is not the assembly line of Ford, nor the factories that to Marx's conscience and mind became a red flag. No, the very bricks you pass by on hand-built streets seem to contain the history that their buildings, filled with images of the game's greats on tiny cardboard squares, had turned into a commodity.
The game was invented here, by Abner Doubleday, the man who was the first to pull a trigger at Fort Sumter, and a field carrying his name sits between the shops and the museum which stand to remember the near two-hundred year history of his miraculous creation.