Dated September 1892, this stunning little piece of Trinity history was in a recent auction of sports memorabilia in Chicago. Lee Smith (Trinity MA ’72, Economics), brought to our attention and helped us acquire this “carte-de-visite”–surely one of the earliest “football cards” produced. According to the auction description, “One of the top teams of the day was Trinity College, they played such teams as Harvard, Yale and even crushed Columbia 54-0. The uniformed players are identified as George Hartley and Richard Henry Macauley with a great inscription on the verso: ‘Presented to Miss Edith Ward by her latest conquest. The Freshman Richard Henry Macauley.'”
According to his student file in the Trinity Archives, while Richard Henry Macauley ’95 may have been Miss Edith Ward’s “latest conquest,” he married a Miss Sarah Tainter Bulkeley–the youngest daughter of Lt. Governor William H. Bulkeley (CT)–the year he graduated. He was from Detroit, and worked in his father’s wholesale millinery company for 5 years after graduation, and then four years on his own; his company went bankrupt, after which he entered the insurance business and eventually became manager of the Eastern Michigan branch of Aetna Life Insurance. He died on September 13, 1928 at age 55. In the 1906 College Bulletin he is listed as a graduate member of the “Medusa Society” and an honorary member of “The Royal Egyptian String Octette.”
We have less information so far on the senior, George Derwent Hartley ’93, a native New Yorker and son of an Episcopal clergyman. He was captain of both the football and baseball teams at Trinity during his senior year, was a banker & broker in New York by 1917, and apparently died in San Francisco in 1931, at the age of 62. Hartley was also a donor to the library, giving us an impressive rarity, which is described at great length in the College Bulletin of 1904 (pp. 7-12)–an English translation of John Calvin’s Institutio Christianae Religionis (The Institution of Christian Religion), published in London in 1587.