Champions of America / Williamson, Brooklyn.. American Civil War 1861-1865.

Early baseball card prototype showing ten members of the Atlantics of Brooklyn baseball club. From American Treasures exhibition: "Baseball, America's national pastime, evolved from a child's game to an organized sport in the 1840s and 1850s. It was an urban sport, and the first teams were established in New York City and Brooklyn. By 1860 baseball had replaced cricket as the nation's most popular ball game. Before the Civil War, more than one hundred baseball teams played in the New York City area. During the war, the number of teams dwindled to fewer than thirty, but thousands of spectators flocked to games. The Brooklyn Atlantics dominated early baseball by winning championships in 1861, 1864, and 1865. The Atlantics usually crushed their competition, scoring two or three times more runs than their opponents. The game was an amateur sport: according to the rules of the National Association of Base Ball Players, athletes could not accept wages to play ball, although gifts and jobs were sometimes offered as a means of compensation. Baseball cards as we know them did not become commonplace until the 1880s. This early prototype is actually an original photograph mounted on a card. At the start of the 1865 season, the Atlantics presented opposing teams with framed photographs of the "Champion Nine." The Scottish-born photographer Charles H. Williamson opened a daguerreotype studio in Brooklyn in 1851, continuing to work as a photographer until his death in 1874."
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by Chas. H. Williamson, in the Clerk's Office of the District Cour[t] of the United States, of the Eastern District of New York.
Reference copy available in LOT 4432-A.
Transfer; United States District Court, Eastern District of New York.
Published in: American Treasures in the Library of Congress: Memory, Reason, Imagination. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997, p. 156-157.
Published in: Eyes of the nation : a visual history of the United States / Vincent Virga and curators of the Library of Congress ; historical commentary by Alan Brinkley. New York : Knopf, 1997.
Published in: Baseball Americana : treasures from the Library of Congress / Harry Katz, et al. New York : Smithsonian Books, 2009.
Exhibited: "Baseball Americana" at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., June 2018-June 2019.