A tobacco card, The Saturday Evening Post, the Atlanta fire of 1917, and the U.S. Army all play a role in this story. If you’re a collector of baseball cards or collector of anything old, you may have wondered about the stories the card or object could tell. It is what often comes to my mind when I hold an old baseball card and there isn’t a finer example of “old baseball card” than a card from the T-206 white border baseball set. Identified as T-206 by Jefferson Burdick in his Card Catalog first published in 1939. The “T” signifies a 20th century tobacco card. The corresponding numbers Burdick chose were based on certain characteristics of the card. Numbers 200-235 were for sports issues. 206 is the number Burdick selected for these cards produced from 1909-1911 by the American Tobacco Company. The T-206 is the Grand Daddy of baseball card sets released over the 3 year period of 1909-1911. Its most famous card is that of Honus Wagner. The Wagner card from the T-206 set is so renowned that even casual baseball fans are familiar with it. Often misidentified as the rarest baseball card, it is unquestionably the most valuable card. Low grade copies of the card sell for several million dollars.
There are 524 T-206 cards in the entire set, which is often referred to as “The Monster”. Besides the Wagner, there are 3 other extremely valuable cards that are financially out of reach for most collectors. Many collectors call it complete after collecting 520 cards. It was my pursuit of those 520 cards in the Monster that led me to a card of Gordon Hickman of the Mobile Sea Gulls. Hickman was a pitcher that never made it out of the Minor Leagues. His last season as a player, according to Baseball Reference was 1910 which was followed by a couple of seasons managing Class D for 2 different teams in his home state of Alabama. In a baseball card set of players with intriguing stories, Hickman falls short. When I turned the card over I noticed a stamp on the back with a name and address of the city I live in, Atlanta, Georgia.
As I continued to chase all 520 cards, I also kept an eye out for a matching stamp. I slayed the Monster in 2024 and have yet to find a matching back stamp. There is a website dedicated to T-206 back stamps and my card of Gordon Hickman is the only one identified on the site with this specific stamp. I knew at the time of acquiring the card that I would try to find out about the name on the back.
The back of my Gordon Hickman card has a stamp on the back of a former Saturday Evening Post agent by the name of Lesesne McAllister. Stamps on the back of old tobacco cards are not rare, nor are stamps of Saturday Evening Post agents. The Saturday Evening Post started using young boys to sell their periodical around the turn of the century. This tactic played a factor in increasing their circulation and revitalizing the periodical. The Saturday Evening Post highlighted business success of honest, hard working individuals and tried to help create enterprising young men through their agent program. Young boys could become agents and sell papers. Through a continual series of “sales competitions” they encouraged the boys to sell more to earn prizes.
There are at least 13 of these young men known to us that stamped their name on the back of a T-206 baseball card. It seems like a reasonable way to create their own business card, especially when we consider the time. The tobacco cards with pictures of baseball players had little monetary value in 1910. Nor 40 years later when young boys in the 1950’s would put their Topps or Bowman cards in the spokes of their bicycles to create motor sounds.
The address on the back was 425 Jackson St. in Atlanta. The street is now called Parkway Drive and the house numbers changed years ago. I was able to pinpoint the approximate location of where the house stood using the City Directory from 1911. The McAllister residence is shown between two crossing streets that have not changed names since then.
This was confirmed by the Sanborn Fire maps from the same time period. To think that 115 years ago a young man stamped this card near this spot and carried it down this exact street to give to a potential customer nearby. It had to have occurred before 1912 because the City Directory that year states the McAllister family of 425 Jackson St moved to New Mexico. I was able to bring this card back to its location from about 115 years ago. In the city of Atlanta with so much history, this location is 1 mile North of where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. grew up. One mile West from where Ponce De Leon Park stood, the home of the Atlanta Crackers and where baseball legends once played exhibition games on their way north after Spring Training. It’s now a parking lot, but there is a Magnolia Tree still standing that a Babe Ruth home run ball once landed. The home of Lesesne McAllister stood three miles North from where Hank Aaron hit home run number 715.
With thousands of T-206’s still in existence, it seems very possible that several cards sharing this same stamp from Lesesne McAllister still exist. Until we learn what happened in 1917 when a fire ravaged through parts of Atlanta destroying homes in its path. The fire originated downtown in a low income neighborhood and spread rapidly north. Wooden shingled roofs were the perfect kindling to feed the flames. Homes were destroyed north of the flames in hopes to remove the fuel to feed the fire. The house where the McAllister’s lived was near the edge of the end of the destruction. This site provides further details of the Atlanta Fire of 1917.
It’s very possible that there were T-206 baseball cards with the Saturday Evening Post stamp of Lesesne McAllister that went up in flames in 1917. While I was able to bring the card back to the street where it was stamped in 1910 or 1911. It’s most likely Lesesne never returned after his family moved to New Mexico. So what became of Lesesne McAllister? His first name is written in pencil on the back of the card. Did he write it or did someone else? It seems odd that he would have written his name after stamping his name on the card. Perhaps the person he gave it to, wrote his name to highlight the name of their Saturday Evening Post carrier.
As for young Lesesne, at 17 he joined the U.S. Army in 1915. He later served in the Medical Corps overseas during World War I. Sadly, on October 21st, 1920 the The Evening Herald from Albuquerque, New Mexico reported him dying from friendly fire in MacAllen, Texas near Camp Travis.
He was there working on the Mexican border while serving in the U.S. Army. As with any history it is important to understand what was happening at the time. The Army wasn’t there in 1920 due immigration. The Army was there to protect against Mexican Revolutionary forces led by Pancho Villa.
So here is a card that was produced 115 years ago and we know a little about who and where it was 115 years ago. Of course the card was in someone’s possession until a card collector acquired it, but that history is completely unknown. But from a stamp on the back of a card, a sliver of the card’s history can be ascertained.
