Ogden Park

Ogden Park was a recreational facility on the near north side of Chicago around the 1860s and 1870s. It was home to the Ogden Skating Club. It was on a piece of land east of where Ontario Street (at that time) T-ed into Michigan Avenue. Today's Ontario Street continues several blocks eastward, through the site of that old park.

With no skating possible in the summer, during 1870 the park was rented to the professional, then-independent baseball club, the Chicago White Stockings, as a practice field and for a number of regulation games, usually against local or lesser-known opponents, or sometimes even college teams.

Most of the ball club's "legitimate" games (as the Chicago Tribune termed them), against national professional teams (many of which would turn up in the National Association the following year) were held at the Dexter Park race track near the stockyards.

Overall, the White Stockings played about half their games at each venue, during a home season that ranged from late May to mid-November.

Sources

• Archives of the Chicago Tribune.