C&L Baseball Cards were one of the earliest and most popular brands of baseball cards in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The company was founded in 1886 by brothers Charles and Louis Lehman in Cincinnati, Ohio. At the time, baseball was growing rapidly in popularity across the United States and the Lehman brothers saw an opportunity to capitalize on this by producing collectible cards featuring photos and stats of professional baseball players.
One of the biggest challenges facing C&L in those early years was obtaining high quality photos of the players to include on the cards. Professional photography was still a relatively new technology in the 1880s. Many of the earliest C&L issues from the late 1800s featured crude woodcut illustrations of players rather than photos since photographing all the players on each team was not logistically feasible at the time. The company was an early adopter of photographic printing techniques. By the 1890s, they had mastered the technology needed to produce cards featuring actual photos on a mass scale. This set C&L apart from competitors and helped drive their popularity.
The first C&L baseball cards were issued as a set of 52 cards in 1887. Each card featured a different player from the National League along with their position and team. Some of the stars featured in that pioneering inaugural set included Cap Anson, Jim O’Rourke, Buck Ewing, and Dan Brouthers. The cards had a blue back with red printing. Subsequent early issues in the late 1880s and 1890s expanded the sets to include more players from both the NL and American Association. C&L also began regularly issuing new sets each season to keep up with the ever-changing rosters across MLB.
In the early 1900s, C&L began experimenting with different card designs and added more statistical information to the backs of the cards. Some notable designs included bordered portraits, action shots of players, and multi-player “team” cards. The information provided on the backs grew over the years, eventually listing each player’s career batting average and home run totals. C&L also became the first company to assign unique numbers to each player card in a set, starting with their 1909 issues – a numbering system that became standard in the industry.
World War 1 posed challenges for C&L and the baseball card industry as a whole. The war effort restricted production of non-essential commodities. As a result, C&L and other brands had to cut back on the number of cards printed during this period. Demand remained high as baseball proved an enjoyable diversion for many Americans during these turbulent times. After the war, C&L was able to ramp production back up and their card sales boomed throughout the 1920s.
One of C&L’s most iconic and valuable early issues is their 1909-11 T206 set. Featuring photolithograph printed images on thick cardboard stock, these cards highlighted the stars of the dead-ball era in vibrant color. The T206 set included legends like Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson. Several key cards from this popular vintage issue have sold at auction in recent years for over $100,000 each. The T206 set helped cement C&L’s reputation as the premier brand for high-quality baseball cards in the early 20th century.
During the 1920s and 30s, C&L continued to be on the cutting edge of baseball card design with issues like their 1933 Goudey set, featuring bright color images on glossy gum cards. They also produced regional sets tailored for specific cities and leagues. Increasing competition from newer brands like Play Ball and Diamond Stars began chipping away at C&L’s market dominance in the late 1930s.
World War 2 once again caused production issues for C&L and the entire industry. Following the war, the increased popularity of chewing gum fueled the boom in post-war issues like Bowman and Topps which featured the gum incentive. C&L attempted to keep up by launching their own 1948 Leaf brand focused on the gum model. They were never able to regain their previous status in the increasingly competitive post-war market.
The Lehman brothers sold C&L to Leaf Inc. in 1954. Leaf continued producing regional C&L sets through the 1950s before phasing out the brand name by the 1960s as Topps had cemented its position as the dominant force in the modern baseball card era. Vintage C&L cards from the late 19th/early 20th century remain hugely popular with collectors today due to their important place in the early history of the hobby. Sets like T206 are consistently some of the most in-demand issues at auction. Over 130 years after its founding, C&L’s pioneering role in the creation of baseball cards is still remembered by collectors worldwide.
