E. Powell Miller was an American tobacco farmer and entrepreneur who created some of the earliest baseball trading cards in the late 19th century. While other companies like Goodwin & Company had produced cards as advertising inserts in tobacco products in the 1880s, Miller’s cards are considered among the first to focus primarily on baseball players and the emerging sport.
Born in 1864 in Virginia, Miller owned a tobacco farm in Orange County. In the late 1880s, he began experimenting with ideas to promote his tobacco products. Cigarettes were becoming increasingly popular, and Miller wanted to find novel ways to market his brands. He realized that many tobacco consumers, especially young men, had a strong interest in baseball. The professional game was rapidly growing across the country, and star players were becoming household names.
In 1888, Miller had the idea to produce small cardboard trading cards—about the size of a modern business card—featuring color lithographed images of popular baseball players on one side and advertisements for his tobacco brands on the reverse. He included 24 cards in packs of cigarettes and chewing tobacco. Each card highlighted a different player and their team, with their picture and basic career stats listed. Miller focused on stars of the day like Cap Anson, Buck Ewing, and Dan Brouthers.
Miller’s baseball cards were an immediate success and helped significantly boost sales of his tobacco products. Young men eagerly collected and traded the cards, which fueled further interest in both baseball and smoking. The concept of trading sports cards had been born. Other tobacco companies soon followed Miller’s lead, producing their own series of baseball cards to include in cigarettes and chewing tobacco in the early 1890s.
While Miller’s original 1888 series is extremely rare today, having only a small number of confirmed surviving examples, his influence on the creation of baseball cards as a mass-market product cannot be overstated. He helped forge a link between the tobacco industry and baseball that would last for decades. Cigarette manufacturers like American Tobacco Company, Piedmont Cigarettes, and Sweet Caporal eventually came to dominate baseball card production through the early 20th century.
Miller continued experimenting with new baseball card ideas in subsequent years. In 1890, he issued a set of larger lithographed cards, each around 3×5 inches in size and printed in multiple colors with more detailed images and statistics. These are among the earliest larger format baseball cards produced. Then in 1891, Miller issued cards as part of the first baseball card bubble-gum, a precursor to modern packs that included a stick of gum along with the cards.
Unfortunately for Miller, his tobacco company struggled financially in the economic Panic years of the 1890s. He was forced out of the tobacco business by the mid-1890s just as baseball cards were taking off commercially. His groundbreaking work in the late 1880s ensured that the tradition of baseball cards included in tobacco products would continue long after he left the industry. E. Powell Miller’s early baseball card releases helped spread interest in the sport nationwide while popularizing the novel concept of collecting player cards that remains an American pastime today.
Miller’s pioneering 1888 tobacco card series is one of the most valuable sets among baseball card collectors. Only a tiny number are known to exist in various states of preservation. In recent decades, as the hobby of sports card collecting has boomed, prices for any of Miller’s rare surviving cards have skyrocketed. A single card in good condition can sell at auction for well over $100,000. In 2016, a PSA-graded example of the Cap Anson card realized a record price of $236,000, highlighting the immense significance and historical importance of E. Powell Miller’s groundbreaking early experiments with baseball on cardboard. While long forgotten, his innovative marketing ideas in the late 19th century helped shape baseball card collecting into the billion-dollar industry it is today.