A tobacco card, The Saturday Evening Post, the Atlanta fire of 1917, and the U.S. Army all play a role in this story. If you’re a collector of baseball cards or anything old, you may have wondered what stories the card or item could tell. It is what often comes to mind when I hold an old baseball card in my hands and there is no better example of an “old baseball card” than a card from the T-206 baseball set with white border. Identified as T-206 by Jefferson Burdick in his Card Catalog, first published in 1939. The “T” signifies a 20th century tobacco card. The corresponding numbers Burdick chose were based on certain features of the map. Numbers 200-235 were for sports issues. 206 is the number selected by Burdick for these cards produced by the American Tobacco Company between 1909 and 1911. The T-206 is the Grand Daddy of baseball card sets released during the three-year period of 1909-1911. The most famous map is that of Honus Wagner. The Wagner card from the T-206 set is so famous that even casual baseball fans are familiar with it. Often misidentified as the rarest baseball card, it is without a doubt the most valuable card. Low-quality copies of the map sell for several million dollars.
There are 524 T-206 cards in the entire set, which is often referred to as “The Monster.” In addition to the Wagner, there are 3 other extremely valuable cards that are financially out of reach for most collectors. Many collectors call it complete after collecting 520 cards. It was my search for those 520 cards in the Monster that led me to a card of Gordon Hickman of the Mobile Sea Gulls. Hickman was a pitcher who never made it out of the Minor Leagues. His final season as a player was according to Baseball Reference 1910, followed by a pair of seasons as a Class D manager for two different teams in his home state of Alabama. In a baseball card set with players with intriguing stories, Hickman falls short. When I turned the card over, I saw a stamp on the back with the name and address of the city where I live, Atlanta, Georgia.
As I continued to chase all 520 cards, I also looked forward to a matching stamp. I defeated the Monster in 2024 and have yet to find a backstamp to match. There is one website dedicated to T-206 back stamps and my card of Gordon Hickman is the only one identified on the site with this specific stamp. When I bought the card I knew I would try to figure out the name on the back.
The back of my Gordon Hickman card has a stamp on the back of a former Saturday Evening Post agent named Lesesne McAllister. Stamps on the backs of old tobacco cards are not rare, as are stamps from agents of the Saturday Evening Post. The Saturday Evening Post started using young boys to sell their magazine around the turn of the century. This tactic played a role in increasing its circulation and revitalizing the magazine. The Saturday Evening Post emphasized the business success of honest, hard-working individuals and sought to create enterprising young men through their agent program. Young boys could become agents and sell papers. Through an ongoing series of ‘selling competitions’ they encouraged the boys to sell more to earn prizes.
At least thirteen of these young men are known to have their names stamped on the back of a T-206 baseball card. It seems like a reasonable way to make their own business card, especially when we consider the time. The tobacco cards with images of baseball players had little monetary value in 1910. Nor did it forty years later, when young boys in the 1950s plugged their Topps or Bowman cards into the spokes of their bicycles to create engine sounds.
The address on the back was 425 Jackson St. in Atlanta. The street is now called Parkway Drive and the house numbers were changed years ago. Using the 1911 city directory, I was able to determine the approximate location of the house. McAllister’s home is shown between two intersecting streets that have not changed names since.
This was confirmed by the Sanborn Fire cards from the same period. To think that 115 years ago a young man stamped this card near this spot and carries it right down this street to give to a potential customer nearby. It must have occurred before 1912 because the city directory for that year states that the McAllister family of 425 Jackson St. had moved to New Mexico. I was able to trace this map back to its location about 115 years ago. In the city of Atlanta with so much history, this location is one mile north of where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. grew up. A mile west of where Ponce De Leon Park stood, home of the Atlanta Crackers and where baseball legends once played exhibition games on their way north after Spring Training. It’s now a parking lot, but there’s still a magnolia tree where a Babe Ruth home run ball once landed. Lesesne McAllister’s home was three miles north of where Hank Aaron hit home run number 715.
With thousands of T-206s still in existence, it seems entirely possible that several cards with the same Lesesne McAllister stamp still exist. Until we learn what happened in 1917 when a fire destroyed parts of Atlanta and destroyed homes in its path. The fire started in the center of a low-income neighborhood and quickly spread north. Wood shingles were the perfect kindling to feed the flames. Homes north of the flames were destroyed in hopes of removing the fuel to feed the fire. The house where the McAllisters lived was at the edge of the end of the devastation. This place provides more details about the Atlanta Fire of 1917.
It is entirely possible that there were T-206 baseball cards with Lesesne McAllister’s Saturday Evening Post stamp that went up in flames in 1917. While I could take the card back to the street where it was stamped in 1910 or 1911. It is very likely that Lesesne never returned after his family moved to New Mexico. So what became of Lesesne McAllister? His first name is written in pencil on the back of the card. Did he write it or did someone else write it? It seems strange that he would have written his name after stamping his name on the card. Perhaps the person he gave it to wrote his name to emphasize the name of the Saturday Evening Post carrier.
As for the young Lesesne, at the age of 17 he joined the United States Army in 1915. He later served in the medical corps overseas during World War I. Sadly, on October 21, 1920, The Evening Herald of Albuquerque, New Mexico reported that he died by friendly fire in MacAllen, Texas, near Camp Travis.
He worked there on the Mexican border while serving in the U.S. Army. As with any history, it is important to understand what was happening at the time. The army was not there in 1920 because of immigration. The army was there to protect against the Mexican revolutionary forces led by Pancho Villa.
So here’s a map that was produced 115 years ago and we know a little bit about who and where he was 115 years ago. Of course, the map was in someone’s possession until a map collector acquired it, but that history is completely unknown. But a piece of the card’s history can be traced based on a stamp on the back of a card.
#cardboard #talk