Civil War Dolls Pegged as Smugglers

The Civil War continues to fascinate as its 150th anniversary approaches. The latest story to capture the public fancy is that of a pair of dolls thought to have been vessels for smuggling.

The papier mache dolls, which measure up to 3 feet in length and have been resting quietly at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., have become items of intense speculation in recent days, as recent X-rays have revealed hidden cavities and other hints that medicine was smuggled inside the two wooden girls (called Lucy Ann and Nina) on a ship bound for the American South from Great Britain. The idea would have been to get the medicine inside the dolls past the ever-present Union blockade.

No evidence of what was smuggled has been found, but officials at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center have scanned evidence that something was in this cavities, most prominently evidenced by not only a gash in the head of one dolls but also signs of the dolls' heads being stitched back on the bodies, presumably after the contents were removed.

The two dolls came from two different donors, both of whom insisted that medicine was the substance was smuggled into Confederate hospitals. The most obvious entities would be morphine and quinine, which could be used to malaria and other sources of devastation far behind enemy lines.

Lucy Ann came from an anonymous donor. Nina's donor, however, is known. That would be the children of Gen. James Patton Anderson, the commander of the Tennessee Army of the Confederacy.

Further tests, if ordered, would be forensic in nature, to discover traces of the smuggled contents, whatever they were.

Nuns to Make Money Off Baseball ... Card

The Lord works in mysterious ways. It's a common refrain among the Christian clergy and the Christian laity, and it's certainly applicable in this case.

Seems a certain man who died a few years ago left everything he had to the order of Roman Catholic nuns to which his sister belonged. Also seems that among the man's possessions was a very rare baseball card.

Collectors will immediately recognize the value of a T206 Honus Wagner, of which only 60 are known to exist. This is the most famous baseball card in history.

The paucity of copies of this card is the first clue that the card's worth has some heft. The card is more well-known, however, in collecting circles because of why so few copies exist.

Wagner was a super baseball player, one of the best in the history of the game, one of the first five ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. A shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, he was a speedy hitter (nicknamed the "Flying Dutchman") with tremendous defensive range and a terrific eye at the plate, compiling a lifetime .328 batting average. He won the National League batting title eight times, and his Pirates won the World Series in 1909.

The baseball card in question is famous because Wagner wanted it gone. He pressured the American Tobacco Company to take his card out of production, and so the T206 series, which was printed from 1909 to 1911, is the only known series to contain a Honus Wagner card. Wagner's commonly acknowledged motivation for doing this was because he didn't want to encourage smoking by children, the natural audience for baseball cards. However, some sources say that Wagner demanded more money than ATC was willing to pay and that it was perhaps the tobacco company that pulled the plug on the Wagner card. Whatever the motivation, the card was no more.

The current card is in the hands of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, in Baltimore, Md. The nuns are planning to put the card up for auction. The last Wagner sold brought in $2.8 million, the largest amount of money ever paid for a baseball card. That was in 2007, and that card was in mint condition. The nuns hope to fetch up to $200,000 from a collector willing to put up with the slight imperfections of the card, including a few missing borders and a large crease in one corner. The deceased had owned the card since 1936 and had had the card laminated, no doubt after watching the card's value go up over the years.