The Professional Bowlers Association traces back to an 1841 Connecticut law that banned nine-pin bowling. The folk story about how bowlers beat it isn't true.
The standard tale goes like this: Connecticut criminalized nine-pin bowling in 1841 to stop gambling. A clever proprietor whose name is never recorded added a tenth pin, declared the new game legal, and modern tenpin bowling was born. The story appears in the Encyclopedia Americana, the Christian Science Monitor, the website of Roseland Cottage in Woodstock, Connecticut, and the public materials of the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame in Arlington, Texas. Every casual bowling channel on YouTube repeats it.
It falls apart on the dates. A surviving 1810 English painting at the International Bowling Museum shows ten pins arranged in a triangle — thirty-one years before Connecticut's law. American newspapers were advertising tenpin alleys by 1820. In 1834, the city of Washington passed a bowling ordinance covering "any number of pins whatsoever" — language written specifically to close the loophole that supposedly wasn't invented for another seven years. Maryland banned nine-pin before Connecticut did. Arkansas's 1843 amendment criminalized "any person who shall set up and keep a nine or ten pin alley," and the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld it in State v. Hanger and Bell.
In 1846 — five years after the ban — a Connecticut silk merchant named Henry Chandler Bowen built a tenpin alley inside his Gothic Revival summer home in Woodstock. Bowen was an abolitionist newspaper publisher and a teetotaler. He was not who the law was written to stop. Roseland Cottage still stands. Bowen's alley is still inside it. The museum's curator, Kari Smith, has called the loophole tale a legend rather than history.
The Connecticut General Assembly was not trying to prevent bowling. It was trying to kill the commercial nine-pin alley — the saloon-attached gambling hall where working men bet their pay on pin counts. Tenpin survived because it was already played in hotels, private estates, and respectable venues. Texas in 1837 chose taxation over prohibition. Nineteen nine-pin alleys still operate there today. Connecticut has zero. And in May 2021, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont signed House Bill 6451, legalizing the same kind of sports gambling the 1841 law was passed to stop.
Chapters
- 0:00 — The Folk Story Everyone Repeats
- 2:36 — The Evidence That Breaks the Story
- 5:08 — Texas Chose Taxation, Not Prohibition
- 6:21 — Maryland and Arkansas Got There First
- 7:42 — What Connecticut Actually Targeted
- 9:34 — Roseland Cottage and the Quiet Tenpin
- 11:49 — The Real Mechanism: Moral Panic
- 14:02 — Connecticut Now Licenses Online Gambling
Sources
- Nine-pin bowling — Wikipedia
- Roseland Cottage — Historic New England
- Roseland Cottage — Wikipedia
- Connecticut Public Act 21-23 (HB 6451)
- Governor Lamont Signs Sports Wagering Legislation