FANTASTIC YALE 1887 YEARBOOK
WITH LARGE FORMAT SPORTS IMAGES

CREW, AN OUTDOOR BASEBALL GAME AND A TEAM BASEBALL PHOTOGRAPH WITH THE LEGENDARY AMOS ALONZO STAGG !

Yale 1887 Photo Album. Leather bound with metal clasps, gilt lettered cover with "Yale 1887, S.S.S. R.T. French" on the cover. Measures 13½" x 17". Contains 49 cabinet cards of students, professors and Yale’s illustrious President at the time, Timothy Dwight.

Also includes 24 Large Format (9" x 7") original albumen photographs of outdoor scenes, college buildings, various group shots, a student’s room, a boat house and three superb sports images. In the format of Victorian era photo albums with slip-in frames for photo’s. Photographer is "Pach Bros, New Haven."

The remarkable inclusion of a superior rare image of one of sports all time legendary heroes, Amos Alonzo Stagg in the baseball group photo makes this a most extraordinary find.

Occasional light foxing with some mildly affecting the cabinet cards, large format images mostly unaffected. Very good clarity and contrast, baseball outdoor game photo shows light mottling - appears to be from the photographer development process, still Very Good. A number of frames are empty, few edges torn. Leather on binding is very dry with scuffing and leather loss to a few areas, including spine, which has eroded entirely. It is very tight, altogether bright and exceptionally desirable.

TIMOTHY DWIGHT V (1828 - 1916) President of Yale University from 1886 through 1899. A member of Skull & Bones. Assisted in the reorganization of the divinity school, edited the New Englander (later the Yale Review), and served on the American committee on the revision of the Bible (1873-1885). In 1886, he succeeded Noah Porter as president of Yale. Called "Timothy Dwight the Younger," he expanded the institution. It was Dwight who was responsible for changing the name Yale College, to the title "University" this year, 1878.

AMOS ALONZO STAGG (1862-1965): Renowned American collegiate and coach in multiple sports, primarily football, and an overall athletic pioneer. Playing at Yale, where he was a divinity student, he was an assistant baseball coach in 1887 and an end on the first All-American team selected, in 1889. He later became coach at Springfield College (1890-91), the University of Chicago (1892-1932), and the College of the Pacific (1933-46). During his career, he developed numerous basic tactics for the game, as well as some equipment. From 1947 to 1958 he served as an assistant coach under his son at two colleges.

He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach in the charter class of 1951, and was the only individual honored in both areas until the 1990s. Influential in other sports, he developed basketball as a five-player sport and was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in its first group of inductees in 1959. A baseball pitcher in college, he declined an opportunity to play professional baseball but nonetheless impacted the game through his invention of the batting cage.

Known as the "grand old man" of college football, Stagg died in Stockton, California at age 102.