I'm always amazed by some of the long forgotten items that people find in a closet, basement, attic or yard sale. Recently, a Michigan family was cleaning out an old farmhouse and stumbled across a long-sought after collection of football cards. It's worth thousands of dollars and considered the rarest such collection in history.
In 1894, the P.H. Mayo tobacco company produced the first ever set of collectible cards to feature only football players. The 35-card set only contained players from the "Big Three" Ivy League schools, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, as these three colleges were by far the most dominant in the young sport at the time. The cards were small by today's standards and featured a sepia-toned portrait on a black border that contained the player's last name, school and the Mayo Cut Plug logo. The card backs were blank and black. One of the cards did not identify the player shown. Early checklists simply listed this card as "anonymous." The player has since been identified as John Dunlop of Harvard. There are only ten Dunlop cards known to still exist. Depending upon the condition of the card it can be worth anywhere from $10,000-60,000.
The find in Michigan has sent waves through the football card collecting world. "We get a lot of calls from a lot of people saying they've got something, and usually it's not what you expect," says Lou Brown, president of Legends Sports and Games. But Brown says that this set is something different entirely. "It's the 'Holy Grail' of football cards."
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