Tobacco cards (most likely T206's) stolen from steamship company.
 

The railroads are always mentioned as the shipping method for the cards but I don't recall anything about the steamships.

Norfolk Virginia September 11 1909

Attachment 583071

Wow. Very nice finding old articles of any mention of ball players cards.

They sound like they were the Beanie Babies of the 1910's.

Hmmm, maybe Beanie Babies will be worth something again in 100 years or so.

:D

If only they still did this with card criminals.

+1 on that!

Something tells me there is more at play than some worthless cards.

Fun find!


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If it didn't need to get there in a few days (and was probably headed to a coastal location anyway), then by boat is almost always cheaper. There used to be dozens of Class I railroads – meaning adding cost with transfers instead of running it there on just CSX – and coastwise shipping was much more of a major player in the freight game.

I'm just wondering if the shippment was the raw cards, before they were put in packs. Sent from the printer, to the tobacco factory that they were printed for.

That is what I thought when I originally read it Ron that they were individual lose cards in a shipping crate headed to the factory to be inserted in packs.

According to the PSA website:

"All T206 cards were printed at American Litho in New York but were then sent to different locations for packing and distribution."

Most of the packing and distribution was in the southern states. So it would have made sense that the raw cards were being sent by ship to the packing and distribution sites.

Hey David,

This for the most part has been known for a long time and the ATC ledger pages solidify it. What could be questioned is was it cigarettes with the cards in them but I can't imagine he would have been opening 100's of packs of cigarettes to get the cards the most obvious is that it was crates of cards.

Tobacco companies certainly chartered and sometimes owned ships, there are some contemporary articles about that if you search around. This reads to me like the cards were warehoused following a voyage down from NYC and awaiting local pickup. It makes sense; there were no direct rail links to Manhattan from the mainland until July of 1909 when the Hudson Tubes opened and dozens of steamship companies were operating along the East Coast. Before that you had to float your load across the Hudson.

Imagine happening upon a vending crate of T206's, stashed in the back of some old harbor warehouse. :eek:

I wonder what that would do to the prices of T206's? The price of E98's suffered after the "black swamp" find. I guess one of the differences would be that the number of cards in the E98 set is considerably less than T206, and their are so many collectors of the T206's.

Well, Dominions route was shipping cargo from NYC to Norfolk…home of American Tobacco Company. Losing a shipping contract of print materials from American Lithographic in NYC to the largest tobacco manufacturer of the time would have likely came near to bankrupting their shipping operations. It was likely the largest or near largest one of their consumers. It could have been a disaster.

Stating this was a worthless shipment is an incredible understatement.