My oldest card, made sometime between 1862 and 1870, of American champ John C. Heenan of Benecia, California. This is the earliest verifiable boxing card. Charles Deforest Fredricks issued the card as part of his commercially produced "Specialite" series of famous personages, sold from his gallery in New York City. His work is featured in a number of museum collections, including the Smithsonian. The copyright date refers to the making of the image, not the card itself. The form of copyright notice dates the card to before the advent of centralized copyright registration in Washington 1870. Since Heenan was out of the sport before the Civil War ended, I suspect the card was actually issued pre-1865, but there is no way to prove it one way or the other.
