Back in December of 2012, an Ed Walsh T206 with a Blue Old Mill back was first offered for sale to the public via Huggins and Scott Auctions, where it sold for $15,000. Because no one had ever seen an Old Mill back printed with blue ink before, people were understandably skeptical. The card exchanged hands again in November 2013 (via Heritage Auctions) and has not been offered publicly since.
After the Walsh was found and authenticated by SGC, collectors everywhere went to check their Old Mill backs in the hopes they might find a blue one. I know I did at least (with no luck sadly). In the five years since the Walsh surfaced, no other Blue Old Mill backs have been found. Until now.
A couple weeks ago my friend Ron Kornacki posted this video on YouTube. I saw it linked on FaceBook and checked it out.
At the time I didn’t realize that Ron was the owner of the card. The video goes a long way towards proving that the back is indeed blue. However, knowing that the video was made by a fellow back collector, and not a random YouTube account makes me feel a lot better about the authenticity of the card. Ron and I have done a number of deals over the years and his collection is extremely impressive. He started a thread on net54 which can be read by clicking on this link.
This side-by-side scan of Powell and Kleinow (another 150-350 Series Subject) clearly shows that the ink on the two backs is different.
Here is a close-up scan of the Blue Old Mill along with a Polar Bear and a Piedmont 350 back. Once you see these high resolution images, it’s pretty hard to argue that the back of the Powell is indeed printed with blue ink.
There was some debate on the net54 thread as to whether the blue ink used to print the Old Mill back was the same shade as a Polar Bear back, a Piedmont 150 back, or a Piedmont 350 back. In general I think it’s unwise to state opinions and theories as fact when looking back at a set that was printed over 100 years ago. With that being said, I feel pretty strongly that we can rule out Piedmont 150 and Polar Bear as possibilities. Old Mill backs were not printed until 1910, at the very tail end of the 150-350 Series print run. It is very unlikely that Piedmont 150 backs were still being printed when the Old Mill print run started. There are a number of facts that lead me to this conclusion but the simplest is that Dahlen appears with Brooklyn on the front of his Old Mill card, and Elberfeld appears with Washington. Piedmont 150 examples feature them with Boston (Dahlen) and New York (Elberfeld) respectively. In a similar vein, Polar Bear backs were not printed until the 350 Only Series. Most T206 historians agree that production was completed on the 150-350 Series before production of the 350 Only Series began.
With that said, it probably doesn’t matter much which shade of blue was mistakenly used on the Old Mill sheet that featured Powell. As Pat Romolo posted in the net54 thread, the shade of blue used on Piedmont backs varied a decent amount. The same can be said for Polar Bear backs.
