When Karl Kissner’s aunt died in Defiance, Ohio in 2011, she had given her hundred-year family home to Karl and his cousins as an inheritance. The exterior of the house was in shambles and interior clutter filled the rooms as if it had never been cleaned in a century. However, the ruined house could not prevent Karl and Karla, another member of the family, from searching for it because her aunt had left her a note that “they would find things that (they) never knew existed”. (Fox TV Business Network, “Strange Legacy”).
After cleaning most of the interior, the attic was the last area Karl and Karla had to rummage through. But this attic was different from the rest of the house because it contained most of the old family heirlooms and the keys to possible family secrets. It wasn’t until they removed some of the items stacked on top of each other to the rafters that they discovered a small dust-covered box that was against the back wall. When they opened it they discovered more than 700 small photographs of some 30 famous baseball players from the early 20th century tied with a rope. These images included great players like Ty Cobb, Cy Young, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Connie Mack, just to name a few. Among the giant horde, each player had approximately 12 to 16 more identical cards. Although Karl believed that none of them were real baseball cards, as none of them looked like modern cards that include player stats, dates, and the name of the company that made them. Karl put the collection aside until they finished touring the rest of the attic.
Karl’s aunt, Jeanne Hench, was the daughter of Carl Hench, who had emigrated from Germany and lived the American dream as a successful meat merchant and shop owner. He died in the 1940s and left most of his belongings in the attic of the family home, including the mysterious box of strange letters in perfect condition. Mr. Hench’s grandson believes he received the cards as promotional items from a candy store.
Later, Karl opened the box and examined each one. He went online and researched each of the 30 players represented in the collection. The more he searched, the more he imagined huge dollar signs flying into his bank account. Karl knew that the next logical step was to get the 700 professionally authenticated. He called Peter Calderon, a baseball card expert in Dallas, Texas, and sent him samples of the collection.
After examining each card, Calderón nearly hit the ceiling when he realized that the cards were extremely rare vintage originals in pristine condition. Each was identified as a series of “E98” cards from 1910. Karl told him that he had many more and sent them to Calderón.
Calderón immediately notified Karl that his cards were authentic and extremely valuable. After much jubilation, Calderón created them with Heritage Auction to sell a fraction of the cards rather than the entire lot, because selling all 700 in total would flood the former collector’s market for baseball cards, potentially reducing the values of the multi-billion dollar baseball card industry. Over a period of time, Heritage Auction House sold the partial lot for a total of more than $ 1,800,000. The rest was distributed evenly among twenty of Karl’s cousins to do as they pleased. It goes without saying that Karl and each of his cousins could easily retire by auctioning off the rest of the cards, and that is exactly what they will do, but gradually so as not to hurt the baseball card industry.
The remainder of the collection is estimated to sell for $ 3 million. The collection Karl discovered earned the name “Black Swamp Find” to link the geographic and historical area of Northwest Ohio to add notoriety to the vast collection of some of the oldest and rarest baseball card collections.
