Description:

Baseball


Elihu Phinney, Jr., owner of field where Abner Doubleday supposedly invented baseball, 1858 DS

 

Otsego County Bank Check No. 477 signed by influential book publisher and seller Elihu Phinney, Jr. as "EPhinney" in payee line. Check in the amount of $8.87 issued from Cooperstown, New York on October 16, 1858 to unknown recipient. Pale blue partly printed check with cancellation mark at center in near fine condition, measuring 7" x 3".

 

Elihu Phinney, Jr., owner of the famous cow pasture where baseball was supposedly invented, wrote a check in 1858. Elihu Jr. had taken over his father's successful Cooperstown, New York publishing and printing business along with brother Henry in 1813. The Phinney brothers also inherited family farmland, which figured prominently in a long-prized baseball foundation myth.

 

The Mills Commission, formed in 1905 to determine the origins of American baseball, concluded that future Major General Abner Doubleday (1819-1893) had invented the game of baseball in the Phinney cow pasture in Cooperstown in 1839. It was this belief that later spurred construction of Doubleday Field and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. The theory that Doubleday invented baseball--or indeed even played baseball--has since been questioned and/or debunked, but it is clear that Cooperstown residents enjoyed pitching and hitting in the Phinney field during the earliest days of baseball!

 

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