McLoughlin Bros ID and Date

[cincicards]

Looking for any info for this item, date of issue and what it is. Included a pic of the envelope that it was mailed in originally. Thanks in advance.

Mcgl1.jpg

Mcgl2.jpg

Mcgl3.jpg

Mcgl4.jpg

[Leon]

What medium is it on (paper I presume)? It almost looks like silk. Initial era, for me, looks to be 1910s.....just a semi educated guess....

I should add, dating the stamp will help date it and the stamp actually looks older than 1910s.....

[cincicards]

It's printed on thin paper, I was thinking more nineteenth century as date of issue.

[sb1]

William Wallace Childs was a cadet the Carolina Military Institute, he was born in 1857, so probably attended in the late 1870's/early 1880's. The stamped envelope is from the 1870's/80's era as well.

[Butch7999]

Having done quite a bit of research on McLoughlin's baseball-related material, we're a bit embarrassed to admit that we don't know
the exact source of that image. We'd swear we've seen it, or something very much like it, elsewhere on an ancient trade card
(ah, of course, the fellow on the 1860s Peck & Snyder cards -- similar but not matching).

Scott's (sb1) excellent research seems pretty conclusive, though, as to an approximate date -- mid-to-late 1870s, maybe 1880,
but it seems unlikely a military school cadet would have been much older than 21-22, so we'd doubt later than 1880.

The style of cap, apron-front shirt, long pants, billy-goat beard, multi-sectioned ball, and gloveless hands (are they gloveless?
-- different color than face, no fingernails) all suggest pre-1880 antiquity as well, although McLoughlin in particular were notorious
for using illustrations showing far, far older styles of equipment than were in vogue at the the time of publication.

Our best guess would be that it's a page cut from any one of dozens of possible candidates among McLoughlin's hundreds
of picture-and-rhyme books for kids published in that era. It's curious, though, given McLoughlin's exacting standards
in high-end printing, that the color appears off-register in places.

In case, wonderful artifact!

[FourStrikes]

have seen / had a number of these, baseball-related and otherwise - generally see these described as "penny dreadfulls" and "vinegar valentines" (when appropriate) and offered as such.

in any case, they're cool.