Harvard Stadium -Soldiers Field

New England Sun Control was selected to provide a sun control solution to help protect Harvard’s baseball collections. The collection details of what is being protected by our window film is as follows:

This collection chiefly consists of ephemera and information about baseball at Harvard; the collection also contains baseball clothing and equipment. The earliest original artifacts are tickets in the 1867 folder.

The collection focuses on baseball as played at Harvard University including play by the ’66 Base Ball Club and the Harvard University Base Ball Club (H.U.B.B.C). The material dates from baseball’s inception at Harvard in the early 1860s until the 1980s, with additional material dating from the beginning of the 21st century.

Materials consist chiefly of ephemera such as tickets, scorecards, programs, and ribbons. The tickets (whole game tickets, torn tickets and season passes) are largely monochromatic with a few graphic flourishes on tickets from 1894, 1913, and the 1920s. Scorecards are varied in format and construction. They range from single sheets to programs, but all were blank forms used to keep score in various ways. These scorecards often include photographs of the teams. The collection contains ribbons issued to ushers for baseball games in 1868, 1893, 1894, 1896, 1905, 1909, and 1913. Still other formats in the collection are dinner programs from 1897, 1901 and 1905, and reunion buttonscommemorating the defeat of Yale’s baseball team by Harvard’s team in 1876, 1877, and 1878. Other textiles include cap and blazer monograms cut from the Harvard Base Ball Club uniforms of 1894.

The baseball clothing and equipment in the collection includes a uniform, cap, socks, a bat, catcher’s mask, catcher’s mitts, and baseballs.

The collection also contains works about baseball in the form of newspaper and magazine articles and unpublished essays. Newspaper articles are usually from Boston papers and occasionally give play-by-play descriptions of games. Essays and magazine articles are chiefly written by Harvard alumni about Harvard baseball topics or are memoirs.

Interesting graphics appear on all formats in the collection. Some are colorful such as “A Stern Chase” from 1883, a postcard from 1905 showing a Harvard ballplayer, and a program from a Harvard-Princeton game from 1900. Other graphics which are not quite so colorful include a scorecard from 1870 depicting a ballplayer and a dog and a cartoon from 1883 detailing various sports as an Egyptian hieroglyph.