American Icons - Baseball Hall of Fame - Abner Doubleday ©Terry Heffernan

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Artifacts from the Baseball Hall of Fame

Abner Doubleday 1819 - 1893

His name is world famous as the inventor of baseball. In reality, Abner Doubleday's true claim to fame lies with his Civil War heroics. In 1907, a special baseball commission recognized Doubleday as baseball's founder based on the testimony of a boyhood friend named Abner Graves. 'It's all part of American mythology and folklore, like Paul Bunyan and John Henry,' said Jim Gates, library director at the National Baseball of Fame & Museum in Cooperstown. 'But folklore is an important part of the American story.' Doubleday was born in Ballston Spa on June 26, 1819, and graduated from West Point in 1842, which puts him at the U.S. Military Academy when Graves said he was supposedly playing baseball in Cooperstown, in 1839. The Mills Commission, created by sporting good magnate Albert Spalding in 1905, undertook a nationwide effort to determine baseball's origins and settled on Graves' written testimony as the most acceptable story.

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