1862.104

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Ballplaying Featured on 1862 Letterhead for Camp Doubleday

Salience	Peripheral
Tags	Drawing, FamousDrawing, Famous
Location	Washington DCWashington DC
City/State/Country:	Washington, DC, United States
Modern Address
Game
Immediacy of Report	Contemporary
Age of Players	AdultAdult
Holiday
Notables
Text	A.  John Thorn: "Abner Doubleday has become a joke among us baseball folks. ("He didn't invent baseball; baseball invented him.") This letterhead, from 1862, may give pause even to hardened skeptics." B. David Block: "In the foreground of the illustration two soldiers face each other with bats, one striking a ball. Since no other players are involved, the only game that seems to correlate to the image is, in fact, drive ball.  If not for Abner Doubleday's association, we would pay this little heed, but it is a matter of curiosity, if not amusement, to place baseball's legendary noninventor in such close proximity to a game involving a bat and ball."
Sources	A.  John Thorn, Tweet on 2/2/22.  John also notes that the game depicted does not resemble base ball, or wicket, or cricket. B. David Block, Baseball before We Knew It (U Nebraska, 2005), page 198. See also brief Protoball entry on Drive Ball.
Warning
Comment	Camp Doubleday is described in an 1896 source as "just outside Brooklyn city limits."   https://museum.dmna.ny.gov/unit-history/artillery/5th-heavy-artillery-regiment/prison-pens-south; Other sources locate it on Long Island, NY. Another source locates Camp Doubleday in Northwest Washington DC:  https://www.northamericanforts.com/East/dc.html#NW   David Block suggests the drawing (below: game is shown in an adjacent field) shows Drive Ball, a fungo game: see Baseball Before We Knew It , page 198.  See also Drive Ball.   One auction house in 2015 claimed  "This is perhaps the very first piece of American stationery depicting Union soldiers playing baseball. Amazingly, this lithograph has it all by showing Union soldiers at play in Camp Doubleday which, of course, was named after the game's creator Abner Doubleday!"   From John Thorn, 2/22/22: "Lithographer is Louis N. Rosenthal of Philadelphia. Born 1824."  See https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/digitool%3A79709   Edit with form to add a comment
Query	So, was Abner Doubleday actually connected to this DC Army facility?  And/or the downstate NY facility? Is it clear why someone would create such a letterhead? Can we find a fuller description of drive Ball? There were actually two Camp Doubledays? How does Protoball give a source for John's Tweet?       Edit with form to add a query
Source Image
External Number
Submitted by	Bruce Allardice; John Thorn (2022)
Submission Note	Tweet, 2/2/22
Has Supplemental Text

1862.104 Ballplaying Featured on 1862 Letterhead for Camp Doubleday"

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