On February 6th 2016, Pat posted a thread on net54 titled “I Believe This Could Be A Complete Horizontal Layout For This T206 Sheet”. In it, he goes into great detail about how he re-created a Piedmont 150 sheet by connecting the Plate Scratches on the backs of the cards.
In Part One of this article, I posted a Cliffs Notes version of Pat’s net54 thread. You can read Part One by clicking the link below:
Piedmont 150 Bull Durham with dark plate scratch on the back
For Part Two, I wanted to dive in a little deeper. Pat was kind enough to work with me by providing scans and answering all the questions I had. Our conversation is below:
Q: How long have you been collecting T206?
A: I purchased my first T206s at the 2003 National in Atlantic City. I don’t remember exactly how many, but it was around ten raw Fair-to-VG commons that included a couple of Sovereigns and a Jennings (One Hand) in a PSA 5 holder.
Q: Before beginning to collect the P150 Plate Scratches, how did you collect the set?
A: I never really had a strategy, but early on I did have a phase when I was collecting non-Piedmonts and Sweet Caporals (like many T206 collectors, I wish I had stayed with that longer).
Q: How did you first become interested in the plate scratches?
A: When Steve Birmingham started the thread on Net54 about the plate scratches, he was looking for scans. So I checked my collection and found that I had one. I started tracking ebay and past sales looking for scans to send Steve. Each one I found motivated me to search for more, hoping he would be able to come up with a sheet layout from them.
Q: Do you remember the first card you owned that had a plate scratch?
A: It was a Shipke scratch that I had in my collection and, coincidentally it matched up next to one of the Cobb scans that Steve had.
Q: What gave you the idea to try and re-create an entire sheet of Piedmont 150s using the plate scratches?
A: Once again, all the credit goes to Steve. Steve and I were emailing back and forth. I was sending him scans of the scratches I found and he was working on trying to piece a sheet together. At the time it seemed like he was gaining the most traction around the Cobb, but in a couple of our emails he stated he didn’t have much free time to work on it. I don’t think anyone was sure if there was more than one sheet involved, but I decided to try and see what I could come up with from a Seymour I had with a double scratch on it.
The circled pink mark offers more evidence that Seymour and Cicotte were neighbors on this Piedmont 150 sheet
Q: Can you share any breakthroughs that you have had while working on it?
A: There have been several, but I would say three of the main ones are:
The first time I found an unconfirmed scratch using a template I made off the Seymour scratch.
Finding a Seymour with a print mark on the front that connected to a mark on the front of a Cicotte (Seymour and Cicotte have several different scratches on the back that link them together).
Filling the last missing slot on what I call the “A-B sheet”.
Q: Have you had any missing pieces to the puzzle that have taken you a very long time to find?
A: There are still a few that I think should exist and probably a lot more I don’t know about. I think the A-B Sheet is complete minus a second subject that matches O’Leary, but I can’t say for sure. It took me four years to find a Gibson that filled the Gibson/Bresnahan slot in the A-B Sheet. A month or two later, I found the Bresnahan. Also, Steve had sent me a scan of a Powell scratch that I could never find another scan of until one was listed on ebay about a month ago. Coincidentally, another one popped up a couple weeks later. So it took me almost five years to find one, and then two showed up within weeks of each other.
Q: Do you try to own a copy of each scratch, or are you generally happy to just save scans?
A: In the very beginning I was just saving scans, but I purchased a couple of the cheaper ones when I saw them on ebay. I found when I had them in hand I could glean more information from them. I have a few that had a second scratch on them that I didn’t notice until I had them. I have also picked up a few that only had front scans in the listing but I knew they were plate scratches because of a flaw on the front. I have at least one copy of the majority of them, but I do lack most of the expensive ones. There are four different Cobb (Bat on) scratches, two Cobb (Green Portrait), three Johnson (Portrait), three Mathewson (White Cap) and one Mathewson (Portrait). I do have one of the Cobb (Bat On), but the rest are too expensive for me.
Q: Is there anything I didn’t think to ask that you have learned from your work on this project?
A: On a side note, the mystery surrounding the Plank continues over to the Plate Scratches. There are only a few (all hand-cut) Piedmont 150 Planks, but two of them have the same Plate Scratch. The Plate Scratch on the Plank goes almost straight across. All of the other Plate Scratches are on a few different angles, so the Plank doesn’t match up with any of them.
I do have a theory about why this might be. Awhile back someone mentioned that the scratches could have been caused by a nail or something on a shelf they were stored on. I have seen pictures of the stones on shelves and also on pallets.
If a worker taking one of the stones off the shelf or pallet slid it back and turned it to grab one of the corners, it would create a straight scratch for a couple of inches and an angled scratch across the rest of the stones. If Plank was on the end of a sheet, that would cause the straight scratch that’s seen on the two examples.
