Who was Alexander Cartwright?
You can read every work on baseball ever published and glean only a few sentences, most of them inaccurate, about this founding father. He is variously described in standard reference books (if he is mentioned at all) as an engineer, a surveyor, a draftsman, a New York City fireman. His father was a maritime surveyor, he was a volunteer fireman and some of his best friends sold fire insurance, but his trade, originally, was banking. Alexander Cartwright was a big man. He stood 6’2″ and weighed 210 pounds. He had dark hair, dark eyes and was considered an excellent athlete. By 1845 he had been married for three years to Eliza Ann Van Wie of Albany, and he was prospering. He lived in a house on Eighth Street just off Fifth Avenue. He earned a good living as a teller in the Union Bank on Wall Street. The cashier there, and his superior officer, was Daniel Ebbets, an ancestor of Charles Hercules Ebbets, who, half a century later, became the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers and laid out Ebbets
