Black Swamp Find? Tell me more!
 

I would LOVE to hear more about the “Black Swamp Find” from members here who know the story well… I recently made a trade with a fellow member here with an amazing collection of cards which included this E98 HOFer Roger Bresnahan.

I have heard of the Black Swamp Find and just read a story about it on the PSA site but I figured some here might have other insights - would love to hear more!

(Also, I thought all of the E98 cards from that find had a mention of the Black Swamp Find but this one does not… any idea why not?)

Thx all (as a bonus, I am adding a photo from the Hall of Fame that I visited last week where I saw the original image posted that was the model image for this card, which I thought was pretty cool - sorry for sideways image… positing this from my phone)

Jeff

I don't know any more than what is published online re the BSF. BSF cards were stigmatized at first...some didn't/don't believe they are real. They also changed the landscape of e98 collecting forever as there are now more ultra high grade examples than not.

Many of these cards have been reholdered...or have been since graded without the BSF moniker as I believe people are trying to distance their cards from the find.

Additionally I believe family members of the find likely still hold numerous more yet to be holdered examples.

Actually the story that I was told is that some of the family held back ungraded examples--more cards than what had been initially graded and sold by Heritage. After Heritage sold the ones they graded, the other part of the find was sold off and ended up with Evan Mathis. Those are the high grade E98s that you see without the BSF provenance on the holders.

I was aware that some of the family held back cards from the intital group graded by PSA and sold by HA. I was not aware that Evan bought a group from the family. Were these the ones that were subsequently graded by SGC?

This kind of speaks to the issue with the collectability of the BSF cards. No one knows the full story of how many were in the find and it seems more and more keep coming to market. Could you imagine what would happen to the market for these if a large portion has still not been released?

Its amazing that a batch survived untouched after all these years.
Had a couple of them

Here's one that I scanned

https://qualitycards.com/pictures/9006625044.jpg
https://qualitycards.com/pictures/9006625044b.jpg

& PSA handed out promos of the cards at the 2012 National Convention.
it has a write up on the card back

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/GFAAA...b0/s-l1600.jpg

Evan Mathis eventually ended up with the ungraded cards that were held back. They were not offered to him initially. I forget the quantity but it was more than the 600 or 700 that were initially graded. PSA and SGC have graded some of these and the provenance was intentionally left out on some or most of them.

I recall there was an interview early on after the find was made public that alluded to the fact that not all of the cards ended up with Heritage.

WOW!!!!!! I didn't realize there were THAT many?????

Prior to the find, PSA had a total of 627 in their pop report. They have now graded 2,238. No doubt that includes BSF card having been broken out and resubmitted but a staggering increase.

No idea what SGC's pop report showed prior to 2012 but they have now graded 1,839 E98s but who knows how many of those are cards being resubmitted.

Oh man, the original “junk wax” era! Who knew?? Maybe I’ll trade my Bres for a sweet Gregg Jeffries RC!

Is it known who these cards originally belonged to?

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I think BSF cards should be considered a separate set from original circulation E98's. The buyers of BSF and OC cards are completely different collectors, BSF collectors lean more towards hi-grade registry type of stuff.

When I put my sets together I only wanted original circulation cards so I could experience what is was like to build the sets pre-BSF.

The best OC set I have seen is a member here who put a Green one together with his dad prior to BSF, beautiful set, apologies I can't remember his username.

And a couple of cards.
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I believe the father of the woman who lived in the home had a small store back in the day, and speculation was that instead of handing out all the cards with the candy he was selling, he took the cards of maybe just a couple players to the store to hand out, and the rest somehow ended up untouched, and still bound together by player, in the attic of his house. I think the guy had two daughters who ended up with the house when he passed, and then when the last sister passed, other members of the family came in and found the cards in the attic. IIRC, there were just a very few players in the E98 set that were not included in the cards found in the attic, or there was only one or two of them. And thus, the speculation that the store owner/father had taken a couple of the stacks of player cards to the store to hand out, and then for whatever reason left, forgot, or took home the rest of the cards at/to his house, and then forgot about them.

Interesting story! Thanks, Bob.

I can tell you that a lot of E98 collectors were not thrilled when the black swamp find came out :(

Oh heck, of course not. Just think about how all those older E98 collectors that thought their PSA/SGC 3 and 4 and 5 graded cards were the highest ever graded, and then find out overnight there are now 15-20 cards of each player that just blow their cards away condition-wise. LOL I'm sure they were so pleased to see how the value of their formerly highest graded examples reacted to those new cards hitting the hobby.

But that is a risk that every collector has with their vintage/pre-war cards that are rare in either quantity or condition. Someone comes across a find and all of a sudden the supply side of the supply and demand equation gets a major upheaval. LOL It certainly doesn't happen often, but the Black Swamp find shows it can happen. Remember the even more recent Ty Cobb with the Ty Cobb King of the Tobacco World card find from back in 2016? A family ended up finding 8 of those cards, and IIRC before the find there were only a whopping 15 or so known to exist. That certainly had an impact on the supply side, and ultimate value, of those Ty Cobb cards.

Not thrilled
 

Took me about 20 years to put that set together and then some goobers find a bunch of pristine cards in an attic...definitely not thrilled...Jerry

If I'm not mistaken, when he came to the message board to inquire about his find didn't he also have some rare colgan chips (like a Thorpe) as well. I know we all thought it was too good to be true and that there was something fishy about it. But...turns out it was all legit and then things got very exciting. My memory may not be totally accurate.

Bill

Great thread.

How did the find affect the prices of the lower end cards and how has the prices changed on the new cards since the find to now?

Different find, I believe you're referring to the Skydash collection. https://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=88092

Ah...the famous "I mis-remembered"! Thanks for clarifying. That was an amazing find too!

Bill

+1

I was thinking the same thing, the Skydash collection as well. The big difference with the Skydash find though was that it was a large number of single, different cards, across various sets. It didn't end up having the same overall effect on specific card issues like the Ty Cobb Tobacco and Black Swamp finds did as those were multiple cards of the exact same player(s) that significantly changed the total number of those cards in the marketplace. All three were great finds, but it is just that the Skydash find didn't have the same overall economic impact on certain cards of other collector's like the Ty Cobb and Black Swamp finds did.

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i think the cobb/cobb find helped the values...not so with BSF.

43. Black Swamp and Circumstance
The joy felt by obtaining a card that has its association with a noted collector or historical find stated right on the label.



And a pic fix for the OP...

Attachment 559029

The initial publicity probably helped the values by making the card more well-known in the hobby at first. Kind of like the spike you normally see in card prices for players that just got elected to the HOF, or passed away. They usually return to norms pretty quickly afterwards. But in the long run, having more of a card generally results in lower values over the long haul as the law of supply and demand takes over.

Now if you really wanted to see the prices of those Ty Cobb King of the Tobacco World cards skyrocket, and stay in the stratosphere, get the hobby, and especially a TPG (preferably one with a registry), to now consider and recognize those Ty Cobb/Ty Cobb back cards as a legitimate part of the T206 set. There's what, 60-70 supposedly known T206 Wagner cards still in existence. And now you'd be talking about what would arguably be the rarest card back in the T206 set with only about 23 known examples existing. Could only imagine what that would do to those card's value.

You can learn all you want to on the episode from the show Strange Inheritance. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4391122/

Very likely you can find it on a streaming service or it will pop up on MSNBC or something.

The BSF ones look so odd to me in amazing condition, like reprints almost, although I know they are not.

I picked up a Bad Bill recently, but I wanted to make sure it was a beater.

Great episode.

Sent from my SM-S906U using Tapatalk

I also found it on Tubi. It is the first episode of the first season of the show Strange Inheritance...what a way to jumpstart a show.

The episode states 800 cards were involved. Is this the total amount that was supposedly sold from the find, or the overall amount of cards in the find? The episode mentions that some of the 20 or so relatives involved decided to keep their portion of the find (at the time of the episode, which was 2015). And I remember hearing conjecture that there was even more that was not put up for sale, which a previous poster has alluded to.

Brian

What Black Swamp E98 cards should look like (as if they got fished out of a Black Swamp instead of being plucked from a Bank Vault).

Brian

honestly after reading all the comments some questions have been raised in my head.

-was the owner of this find a distributor for a region or something to have so many of these???? And the majority red? Where are the rest of the colors????

-maybe he had a relationship with the printer? was he the printer??

My understanding is no, he was just the owner of a small meat market store and that the cards were supposed to be handed/given out with something being sold, like candy maybe, or some other item as a type of promotion for the store. The E-98 cards are known as an anonymous set as no one today is 100% certain as to exactly who produced them, or what product or item they were tied to and supposed to be given out with. I just said cany earlier as the set is designated as an "E" set, supposedly linked to a candy issue. There are some of these cards with the extremely rare "Old Put 5 ct. Cigar" stamps on back, but those are not necessarily the main thing these cards were created for, and likely thought to have been used by someone to promote their own product or a different product by stamping the backs of these E98 cards they somehow got a hold of. Here's a story from the Old Cardboard Newsletter about the find from Issue #99, July 2012, Item #4.

https://www.oldcardboard.com/eNews/2.../eNews99.htm#4

Net54 never disappoints…. The background and links are amazing, thx all.

Now I just have to decide if I want to keep my Bres since it gives me a cool story to tell my “man cave” guests when they tour my card space.

It’s not a super valuable card anyway - but it’s oh so pretty!

Thx again (and thx for flipping my Cooperstown photo right side up, Jolly!)

Jeff (OP) - Belfast 1933

PS, I started another thread recently about possibly starting a “Vintage Baseball Collector” podcast soon… this would be a fun topic to cover! Anyone want to volunteer to join as subject matter experts for that episode?

I may try and get this up and going on the next month, maybe sooner

Old cards were generally printed and distributed in quantity with product sales. If the intent was to hand out with purchases at a store, which appears to be the case, it makes sense that there are several hundred or more. The surviving population known in the hobby today is a tiny minority of the original production. Color distribution in E98 is a mystery but that there are a lot of cards sent to a store isn’t weird or means they have some special relationship with the producer or made them themselves or is a huge distributor.

we're talking potentially well over 1000 e98 cards...mostly red. This seems like an awfully large # of cards to me?

LOL Yes!!! If there were more than 1400 cards in this find that is quite a lot for a small local meat market. We are not talking about a Walmart or Target in large heavily populated city but a specialized business is a small community. If he had 50 on hand that would be a large number left over.

My gut tells me there were closer to 1500 cards but I have no exact number. I met most of the family, at the National, when they were being sold. I think I saved about 20 seats for them at the Net54baseball dinner that year, but only a few came to it. Very nice folks, as I recall.
.

The stories always refer to about 700 or so cards that were found. Of the stacks of cards that were still wrapped, there were usually about 20-25 cards in each stack for each player that were found. If there are 30 players in the set, 30 X 20-25 cards of each player equals about the same 700 or so cards that all the stories say was found. Where are you guys getting this 1,000 to 1,500 number from?

And as for the cards being found in the Black Swamp find primarily having red backgrounds, that also makes sense as whoever made them probably printed all the cards with red backgrounds at the same time, and then switched the ink to do the green backgrounds all at once, and so on. So when they bundled up a bunch of cards to send to someone to distribute, they probably created stacks of about 20-25 cards per player, all from the same red background batch. And I'll bet they did the same thing when sending out these cards to others after switching background colors. It is likely that getting different color backgrounds on these cards was dependent on where they were distributed then. Back then, whoever was making these cards probably couldn't have cared less about making sure that people had access to all the different background colors they ended up using.

As I said, it’s context. If it’s a promotional tool for a store, handing out cards with purchases, 1,000 cards isn’t a weird amount that is going to last all that long. Let’s say they hand them out for 3 months only even. That’s 11 cards a day. 1,000 cards is nothing in 1910. The tobacco sets had print runs into the tens of millions according to Fullgraff’s notes, and those aren’t even the biggest sets.

It is a lot of cards in the context of today, where the vast majority of copies haven’t survived. It’s not a lot for a store to have in ~1910, which appears to be the origin. We should not mistake surviving quantities today with quantities then.

i think some of y'all are making assumptions that cannot be substantiated.

Which one?

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Definitely and E-card set, agree the "Old Puts" were an individual store stamping at some point.
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my point is based on the surviving pop of graded e98 around the time of the BSF...the find practically doubled the pop of e98's.

Caramel cards are rare...and were likely printed in much smaller numbers than something like t206.


i believe the BSF contributed an extraordinarily large number of cards to the pop...most of the same color.

This is peculiar.

This is my point. I believe BOB is incorrect in his estimation of 25 examples/card. I remember more like close to 50 each of cobb and wagner.
And I believe 1000+ cards for one store is an extraordinarily large #. If every store got this quantity of cards...there'd be a ton more surviving examples for sure.

just my opinion.

The population for graded E98s more than doubled since 2012. I posted the numbers even if you account for cards being resubmitted. There were more than 1400 cards in this find. We all know what Heritage graded. And I know someone who had been offered, and essentially passed on, the cards which the other family members held back.

I too think it is absurd to think that a local meat market in a small community would have been given that many cards to hand out. They would have been handing them out well past the retirement of most of those players.

More likely that the owner ended up with them sometime after 1910 by the printer or distributor who had these sitting around in storage.

Re: Black Swamp Find? Tell me more!
 

My recollections: The vast majority of the cards were red backgrounds. The only other color in the find was green. There were no Walsh's and only one Mathewson. All other players were well represented. They were found in stacks of 22 cards, with, of course, multiple stacks of the other 28 players.

Jennings was underrepresented as well.

Not a single person is disputing whatsoever that the find drastically increased the surviving number of cards. Pretty much every poster has said this, including me.

I don't know why we would expect a retailer, using the cards as a promotional tool in the middle of a fad for that exact tool (as the primary sources tell us), would order a quantity that would allow them to hand out 1 or 2 at most in a day. We can't know a hand out rate that business had, but the entire point of cards at this time was to use as a promotional tool. It would seem to be counterproductive to place orders of such a tool that would not allow much distribution to customers. A meat market in 1910 still needs customers to survive. It is possible the family guess is wrong and a relative acquired them years later from some other source for unknown reason, but I don't see how to arrive at that as the deductive probability. Perhaps I am missing an element.

We have actual production figures for other sets of this period that very strongly suggest a minuscule survival rate, not a large one.