Goodwin & Company

"Old Judge" cigar box label

"Goodwin's Champions" tobacco card of Jack Glasscock, issued in 1888.

Cliff Carroll in 1887, depicted on a cigarette card.

Goodwin & Company was an American tobacco manufacturer from New York City. Initially E. Goodwin and Brother, the company was founded before the American Civil War. It was known for its cigarette brands "Gypsy Queen" and "Old Judge". In 1890, the company was merged, along with four others, into James Buchanan Duke's American Tobacco Company to create an American monopoly on tobacco product manufacturing and retail.

Charles Goodwin Emery, who had the principal interest in Goodwin & Company, became Treasurer of the American Tobacco Company. Emery built a showplace "castle" at the Thousand Islands (Clayton, New York) and was principal investor in the grand Frontenac Hotel, nearby at the Thousand Islands.

Today the company is mostly remembered for its tobacco trading cards, depicting baseball players, other athletes, and a variety of social scenes and portraits. In 1887, Goodwin & Co. were the among the first to issue trading cards to promote their brands, first using sepia-toned photographic albumen prints, and later chromolithographic reproductions of multi-colored etchings.

In 2011, Upper Deck Company reactivated the Goodwin Champions line, primarily to compete with Topps' revival of the Allen & Ginter brand. Similar to the original Goodwin Champions set, the revived line primarily features athletes from various American sports.

Card sets

• Old Judge, 1887–90 (N172), the first major set of baseball cards, comprising over 2,000 images and using albumen photoprints.
• Gypsy Queen, 1887, using the same images as the "Old Judge" cards, but advertising Goodwin's other brand
• Goodwin Champions, 1888 (N162), a set of 50 athletes in various disciplines, the first Goodwin set to use colored chromolithography.
• Old Judge Cabinets, 1888–89 (N173), a large-formatted set of albumen print photographs that could be retrieved in exchange for mailed-in coupons.

See also

• Baseball cards

References

• Stephen Wong, Susan Einstein: "Smithsonian Baseball: Inside the World's Finest Private Collections"; HarperCollins, 2005 (ISBN 0060838515).
• Baseball cards at the Library of Congress
• "Charles Goodwin Emery," article in Paul Malo's Fools' Paradise.