1862.104

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Ballplaying Featured on 1862 Letterhead for Camp Doubleday

Salience

Peripheral

Tags

Drawing, Famous

Location

Washington DC

City/State/Country:

Washington, DC, United States

Immediacy of Report

Contemporary

Age of Players

Adult

Text

"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."

Sources

John Thorn, Tweet on 2/2/22. John notes that the game depicted does not resemble base ball, or wicket, or cricket.

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 in Long Island, NY.

Another source locates it in Northwest Washington DC: https://www.northamericanforts.com/East/dc.html#NW

David Block suggests the drawing shows Drive ball, a fungo game: see Baseball Before We Knew It (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 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!"

Lithographer is Louis N. Rosenthal of Philadelphia. See https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/digitool%3A79709

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Query

So, was Abner Doubleday somehow connected to this Army faciility?

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Source Image