FS: N73 of Helen Dauvray (Ward)

[oldjudge]

Helen Dauvray was the wife of HOFer John Ward and was the woman who donated the Dauvray Cup, baseball's first World Series Trophy. SABR has published the following:

Whatever happened to the Dauvray Cup? The game’s first World Series trophy, it was commissioned and funded in June 1887 by actress Helen Dauvray—before it was known that she cared for baseball or for New York Giants shortstop John M. Ward, whom she would go on to marry. The cup has been lost for so long that no one alive has seen it; no one can say when or how it was lost, or what fate may have befallen it—until now. Picking up an old, cold trail, I can report what the cup actually looked like—contemporary newspaper woodcuts were wildly off—how much it cost to make, and what may have happened to it between the baseball campaigns of 1893 and 1894. Even more interestingly, however, in the quest for baseball’s lost chalice I stumbled upon the true story of Helen Dauvray’s romantic, fabulously embroidered, self-invented life. The Dauvray Cup was, then and now, all about her.

This card of Helen Dauvray is $175. If interested please email me at oldjudge@gmail.com. This card is from the Cambridge Collection