Introduction
I enjoy solving card mysteries and picking apart curious decisions by gum companies of different eras, in particular when it extends beyond the bounds of cardboard alone. This article is about how much history modest objects like baseball cards contain: a pitched battle between 1880s tobacco companies, the social weights holding down its card subjects, and the pace of industrial automation that reshaped who could and couldn't earn an honest day's wages. This particular slice of cardboard history features a long-dead tobacco brand that Topps revived for modern collectors, Allen & Ginter.
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| Allen & Ginter warehouses, Richmond, VA, circa 1886 |
Recognize that smoking man? Allen & Ginter (the tobacco company) did indeed use this "Old Planter" logo on things like this print of their 19th century warehouses. An 1890s advertising poster gives us a clearer view of his lapels and ruffled collar.
This time, my writing goes beyond just profiling a #5 card and its set. It uses a rare and distinctive group of 1880s Allen & Ginter cards to look at what those cards say about Ginter's choice to employ women in its factories during an era when women first left the home. It also considers how competitor Duke & Sons used automation to force human workers out of those same warehouses, to be replaced by machines that reliably outperformed them. Today's world faces many of those same issues.
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| Duke & Sons building, Durham, NC, circa 1900 |
The H807 "Polka Dot Nine" cabinet cards
I started my type collection 20 years ago, yet new-to-me #5s like this one still emerge from hobby history. In 1886, Allen & Ginter produced a numbered series of Virginia Brights "Polka Dot Nine" tobacco cabinets featuring women posing in detailed costumes that mix baseball and bloomers. These ornate cards are cousins to the N48/N508 Lady Baseball Players I covered some years ago (set profile).
This player sports a dotted "V B" uniform (Virginia Brights) and prepares to catch something from above. Its fine print states these cards represent "the various positions in base ball," so we infer its numbers fit one (pitcher) through nine (right field). Note its picture border sits askew, since it's a real photograph mounted on a cardboard frame. Cabinet collectors expect this kind of card-to-card variation.
What is a cabinet card?
Cabinet cards, or "cabinets," are photos mounted on larger backing. These composite creations cost more to produce than pack-in cards and tobacco makers intended them for display by stores or collectors. They covered several subjects and catch your eye with design, framing, and chutzpah. This dramatic piece shows Fay Templeton, who acted and sang on stage for several decades.
Browse cabinetcardgallery.com for a good range of cabinet photos. My favorite might be this pensive babe.
H807's Young Ladies of Base Ball
Jefferson Burdick, author of the American Card Catalog (ACC), collected a wide range of paper goods, so he often organized sets based on shared design elements first and actual themes second. His ACC lists four different H807 subsets, including two baseball subjects: H807-1's spotted Polka Dot Nine and H807-2's Black Stocking Nine. The latter wore formal, athletic uniforms with form-fitting legs and detailed piping. Leaving so little to the viewer's imagination caused social angst, since any female figure remains a controversial subject for display.
H807 cabinets vary by backing color, footer text, and numbering. Another pose from this series used a white mount and otherwise identical layout. Some cards showed numbers and others omitted them.
This range of dark, light, and ornate borders makes it nigh-impossible to complete a set with one consistent design. Cabinet cards exist in multiple sizes, from larger (7"x13") to smaller (5"x7"), with too few survivors to confirm which one Allen & Ginter printed in greater numbers.
Allen & Ginter's elaborate cards took time and money to produce and, in turn, they required a customer redeem coupons from 1000 cigarettes, based on this promo from the back of a Black Stocking cabinet.
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| "Young Lady Base Ball Nine" redemption info |
Another Ginter set, Opera Puffs, also set its bar at 1000 cigarettes.
The company encouraged redemptions via on-card tags and newspaper ads. The St. Louis Dispatch classifieds include this note on June 29, 1886.
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| From Net54 thread on 19th century set dating |
This Ginter ad feels cagey, with no mention of the "elegant photographs" being ladies, though one might guess that from its association with Virginia Brights, a more genteel brand of its day. This piece does confirm they offered cabinets direct to customers from branch offices.
Dating these baseball sets
This Lawrence Gazette clipping makes it clear Virginia Brights Black Stocking Nine cards reached the Kansas area by September 1886, when competition between Ginter and Duke remained fierce. Most newspapers printed at least some of their sponsor advertising using the same style as news, with this piece written using Ginter's own content.
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| From Net54 thread on Allen & Ginter set dating |
I think many of us would like to be considered "strikingly handsome" at work. "Cigarette Maker" cabinets show women at their rolling desks, a fast-paced job that took women outside the home for long hours, a topic that spurred social anxiety for many who cared to voice an opinion.
While larger cabinets were trade-in incentives, the smaller, "pack stiffener" cards echoed many of these poses and American Card Catalog lists them as N46. They feature smaller, thinner stock, and appealed more to collectors than those seeking a display item. We will return to the cigarette makers themselves later.
Some cabinet makers, like the periodical Police Gazette, sold their pictures via mail-in catalog.
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| 1889 Police Gazette John Ward, auctioned for $9K in 2014 |
The Black Stocking and Polka Dot photos feature women who seem unfamiliar with baseball itself or at least unpracticed. This batter's swapped hands would make it tough to hit outside a studio setting.
Their poses otherwise mirror those common to men's cabinets of the era.
I recommend searching any major auction company's past cabinet card listings, since you can burn a couple of hours getting familiar with our hobby's earliest sets and players. One singular subject is Lizzie Arlington, an on-field pseudonym for Elizabeth Stroud (or Stride), was might be the first woman to play pro baseball with a men's team. (See SABR's coverage for more details.) She appeared on this rare cabinet card in crisp uniform and poised to throw.
The Prewarcards article "Sorting out N48 and N508" notes how N48/N508 cards defy a straightforward checklist. These two women affect similar poses, each are #5 (for third base), yet bear altogether different labels.
They're not alone. Despite Allen & Ginter's own "nine different subjects" declaration, multiple pose variations exist within otherwise matching designs, numbers, and cigarette brands.
These two N48 "2nd base-women" offer a game of finding differences between two pictures: ball in different spot, women are different sizes, one jersey has stripes, one stands over the bag, and so on. I conclude that each number encourages you to look for other numbers to collect without promising you a clean, complete checklist.
Why all these variations in 19th century sets?
Modern companies can review several shots, choose one, and print endless amounts of that player with equal fidelity. Compare that to 1880s photo printing's use of thin sheets of glass as negatives that required careful handling at every step to remain intact.
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| 1886 Old Judge baseball glass negative |
Goodwin & Co's 1887-90 Old Judge cigarettes set shows a similar taste for variation and most of its players appear in multiple poses. Similar to what you saw earlier, the first image for catcher Bill Holbert shows a larger, detailed cabinet photo with player name written on its image. The other two are coarser and smaller pack-in cards with type-labeled text.
This willingness to print multiples says something about the cost of reproducing tobacco cards. Very few photos were taken outside of a studio during that era, so snapping a series of poses for later reuse might've been more practical. Other reasons are possible; the key is observing that pose variety defines this era's sets.
Will the real H807-1 please stand up
These remarkable Virginia Brights images reappeared in many other formats.
Polka Dot Nine images appear on Cuban cigar cards...
...promotional silks...
...store advertising cards...
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| "B No. 5" |
I try not to overthink numbering methods on 19th century card sets. Somewhere along the way, photo printers gave many of these ladies one-to-nine numbers. Several feature "A" and "B" labels, which might've been their organizational system instead of a proper checklist.
Note the small "Copyright by Allen & Ginter, 1886" written in white on that photo. We already saw how Ginter produced these cards as a marketing tool to attract more smokers. This notice referenced protections associated with American copyright law. While fierce competition between domestic companies over the massive tobacco market gave them good reason to guard their creative work against copycats, Duke & Sons found a way to tweak Ginter without violating the letter of those laws.
Cameo Studies as "satire"
Duke riposted Ginter's choice of lady ballplayers with their own "Cameo Studies" cards parodying H807 player designs. Women with hips gained prominent backsides and thinner women became gawking sticks, all drawn in imitation of chalk scratches on a child's blackboard, making "studies" a pun on sketches and schooling.
Card backs took Ginter to task for following Duke's lead in cigarette technology and left no stone unturned in claiming victory, as least in their marketing efforts.
Duke's mechanized cigarette roller machines worked so well that their flip-top boxes became the industry standard. Duke soon forced its lesser competitors into a merged domestic trust, the American Tobacco Company, to improve their ability to compete against Turkish tobacco and other overseas brands. Merging forces also meant, in turn, an end to jobs for human cigarette rollers, just as modern systems continue to replace people with machines today. Find more of Duke's Cameo cards in the Vintage Non-Sports discussion of that H804-39 set.
Ginter's move to the flip-top box
Surviving packs of that era show their commitment to eye-catching colors and composition. Tobacco took a few years to package and distribute, so "crop of 1885" packs came out in 1887-88. Sub Rosa's colorful pack shows the flip-top lid that Duke critiqued them for "imitating" from Duke's Cameo packaging.
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| 1880-90s packs from Net54 thread |
Those who pursue 1880s or 1910s baseball ephemera often add tobacco packs like these to complete the look and feel of that era's collectors.
The political side of H807 images
After seeing Ginter's Virginia Brights cards, you should recognize the original images for another 19th century set, Duke tobacco's "Presidential B. B. Club" of candidates from 1888's race for the White House.
The 1888 Duke Presidential Candidates set (cataloged N154) pasted portrait heads on Black Stocking Nine bodies to turn that year's election into a marketing opportunity.
Duke cropped Cleveland's head from a well-known portrait, as well as for his Democratic running mate Allen Thurman and Republican opponents Benjamin Harrison and Levi Morton. (Republicans won the 1888 Electoral College vote by carrying 19 of 36 states, despite losing the country's popular vote by about 90,000.)
This scan compares 2"x4" N154 pack-in cards to their 7"x11" version. Old Cardboard's fall 2008 issue profiled Duke & Sons cards and declared this to be N814's largest surviving cabinet.
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| N154 card & N814 cabinet pair, auctioned for $2900 in 2005 |
Since Ginter copyrighted their Black Stocking Nine cards prior to 1888, it seems this political set follows a licensing agreement between the former rivals or audacious plagiarism on the part of Duke. See prewarcards.com profile of the N154 set and check out its "big head" photo gallery.
Galleries of H807 Lady Ballplayers cards
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| Detail from 2013 exhibit of Burdick's H807s |
I cautioned earlier that finding H807s will be tough sledding. That's a half-truth, thanks to Jefferson Burdick's donation to New York's Metropolitan Museum. You can browse their scans of a near-set of 5"x7" Black Stocking Nine cabinets. (The museum requests you not download its images, so I link to each card.)
- Hands at knees (A1)
- Fielding a grounder (A2)
- Catching a throw (A3)
- (Not in collection)
- Batter and catcher (A5)
- Catching (or throwing?) a ball (A6)
- Fielder, runner, and equipment (A7)
- Tagging a runner (A8)
- (Not in collection)
- Batter and catcher (unnumbered)
Those museum pages note that H807 includes four subsets, reflected by my H807-* numbering.
- Black Stocking Nine
- Polka Dot Nine
- Girl Cyclists
- Yacht Club Contestants
So what's the story with H807's other sets? When I started writing this, my contemporary knowledge consisted of the baseball cabinets alone, so I sought more details from other 19th century collectors.
Girl Cyclists: H807-3 cabinets and N49 pack cards
These cyclists proved easiest to find in smaller, non-cabinet form, as cataloged N49. Most show women riding penny-farthing bicycles.
Cabinet versions exist, as do hand-numbered variations on their photos.
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| H807-3 Girl Cyclists "No. 5" (cabinet) |
This large format confirms them as H807-3, the cabinet equivalent of N49, and cards feature Allen & Ginter advertising for Richmond Straight Cut Cigarettes. I think this implies distribution sometime after 1886's lady baseball players, as Ginter responded to customer demand for more of these remarkable images.
Allen & Ginter's numbering for these H807-3 cabinets goes well past baseball's one-through-nine, and looks more like cards you could request from a list using its numerical tag.
H232 (but not H807) : The Cigarette Makers
Earlier, you saw this series of cards that connect directly to Ginter's use of women to roll cigarettes in their factories. Perhaps their lack of a sports connection convinced Burdick to omit it from his H807 subsets and place it in the advertising cards section as H232's "Cigarette Making Girls" cabinets.
Ginter took the progressive approach (for its day) of hiring women to roll cigarettes. An obsequious profile from The Industries of Richmond (1886, page 59) claimed 1000+ distaff employees, which could mean our card model worked at rolling desk #529.
The phrase "superiority of this labor" reflects a public relations war within the tobacco industry itself. Many Americans in those 1880s worried about a shift to mechanized industry, so putting employee pictures on cards underscored Ginter's commitment to human work, whether or not they described it in those terms.
A closer look at Ginter's subjects
Some of Allen & Ginter's subjects look similar enough, card-to-card, to question who they used in photos, models or company employees. I think at least two of those cards show the same dark-haired woman, so if that's her cigarette-making desk, she pulled double-duty as a sports and cycling model.
Ditto her lighter-haired baseball colleague, who also appears in (at least) the cyclist set. Women with tight-fitting clothes, and especially those in pants, provided titillation to smokers within a nominally conservative culture, accentuating the perceived sinfulness of smoking-related behaviors.
I think that Ginter asked their own rollers to model for these cards since they were already employees. This adds some poignancy to Ginter's competitive "defeat" at the hands of Duke & Sons a few years later, since merged mechanization also meant the end of jobs for many of those women.
If I were Jefferson Burdick, catalog number H807 would've included the cigarette makers. Instead, we will seek out the sporting side of yachting.
H807-4 Yacht Club Contestants
Finding this boating set of cabinets proves harder, as we might be looking for ladies, ships, or ladies on ships. Let's consider three contemporary candidates.
Virginia Brights created their N50 Famous Ships around the same time as those N48 ballplayers and N49 cyclists. This N50 set, however, seems something else altogether, as it contains larger commercial and military boats, not pleasure craft.
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| From The Met's N50 gallery |
At least one pack-in set exists at the intersection of ladies, tobacco, and boating: 1889 N91/N140 Yacht Colors of the World. Prewarcards profiled this set (plus variations) in detail. These cards, while attractive, feel like a reach for "Yacht Club Contestants," being an altogether different style. We need to keep searching.
Web searches yielded three more Ginter's Richmond Straight Cut cabinets that show ladies with a nautical theme.
Even when rowing, these photo offer a different look and feel compared to the athletic vigor of baseball and bicycling. Some hobby references call them "actors," and they float beyond our baseball lens.
Eventually, other 19th-century collectors put me on a different course, towards a set of the boats themselves.
These single-masted yacht photos show actual racing craft. Mayflower defended the America's Cup in 1886, so it must have appeared in the news often that year and made an appealing choice for this H807-4 cabinet. Several different racers proved famous enough to appear on these attractive cards. They remain scarce and occasionally mislabeled as other subjects, since few collectors know 19th-century boating in detail.
To summarize, three H807 subsets feature women as ballplayers, cigarette rollers, and bike riders. Ginter changed to boats alone for H807-4.
H807 ranked rarity
You've now seen at least one example of all four subsets. While all remain tough to find, their numbering also fits their relative scarcity from "rare" to "super rare."
- Black Stocking Nine
- Polka Dot Nine
- Girl Cyclists
- Yacht Club Contestants
Baseball fans outnumber bikers and boaters over the last 130 years, implying that more baseball cards survived thanks to the sport's relative popularity, even if Allen & Ginter distributed equal amounts to start with.
Closing thoughts on H807
This collection of cabinets included more nuance than it seemed at first, thanks to the business context that produced it. Allen & Ginter made a public relations show of their reliance on female cigarette rollers, going so far as to advertise all of those subjects as "strikingly handsome" and ask them to take on a wide range of costumed roles.
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| H232 "actor" cabinets offered at REA |
It should never surprise you when companies distribute photos of attractive people to catch the jaundiced eyes of lonely customers. The challenge remains how well its underlying actions reflect a company's ethos and self-interest. Ginter's own employees, if that's who appears in these images, soon lost their jobs to the drumbeat of Duke's machine rollers and flip-top packs, leaving behind a small number of surviving cards as compelling evidence of their time at a tobacco warehouse's rolling desk. Duke surely set out to dominate their market. Ginter might have done its best to survive until a merger was their only option.
Business leaders often portray labor as "elegant" or "progressive," and then automate it away, reflecting an invisible drive toward iterative corporate improvement. A growing number of today's companies base their work on libraries constructed from humanity's past effort, largely without credit. Like Ginter's cigarette rollers, we are poised to reach a horizon sooner than expected, should our mechanized replacements create something that meets customer needs faster and more predictably. Perhaps their ensuing cards will reflect human histories like those captured within H807 cabinet images.
Acknowledgments
- Baseball writer Amanda Lane Cumming provided key feedback on earlier drafts
- Several 19th-century collectors helped correct set names and catalog numbers
