Field Manufacturing Corporation

Field Manufacturing Corporation was a Peoria, Illinois-based producer of Pure Mechanical pin games during the industry’s earliest years, active from 1931 through 1933. Operating outside Chicago’s amusement manufacturing hub, Field was one of the few significant early pinball manufacturers to establish itself in downstate Illinois.

Field’s entire catalog of seventeen titles falls within the Pure Mechanical era — the brief window before electric scoring, solenoid-driven bumpers, and other powered features transformed pinball from a simple gravity-fed novelty into a more complex amusement device. Games like The Cedar Ball (1931) and Bingo (1931) represent the industry at its most elemental: small, inexpensive boards that could be placed on a drugstore counter and earn pennies or nickels from customers drawn to the simple pleasure of guiding a steel ball through a field of pins.

Field’s production ended by 1933, before the technological advances that would define pinball’s next several decades had taken hold. The company’s compact, entirely mechanical catalog is a time capsule of the medium’s origin moment — a reminder that pinball began not as the elaborate electromechanical spectacle it would become, but as a humble countertop novelty that dozens of small manufacturers across the Midwest rushed to produce.