At a popular 19th century French cafe, a regular crowd gathered to drink coffee, socialize, catch up on the world’s events, and practice their hand at the ultimate strategy game, chess. Young Napoleon Bonaparte, an artillery officer still, was said to have been among that crowd. Count Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian revolutionary, the British hero of WW II Sir Claude Auchinleck, and Americans such as WW II admiral Chester Nimitz, statesman Benjamin Franklin, and President Abraham Lincoln all were rumored to have visited one of the first Stateside chess organizations.

On this day, October 6, in 1857, the National Chess Association, one the first national chess clubs in the United States, was organized.

The ACA functioned for about four years, promoting the game and awarding a prize to the American winner of an international match with Germany. Thirty years before the first local chess club in the United States was set up in Philadelphia – and due in part to the ACA – a number of other local clubs sprang up, in Cambridge and Yale universities, at a YMCU in Boston and elsewhere across New England.