Cooperstown Opens the Baseball Hall of Fame

On June 12, 1939, roughly 12,000 fans packed Main Street in Cooperstown for the dedication of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, the public debut of a building that Singer Sewing Machine heir Stephen Carlton Clark had pushed to construct as a way to pull Depression-battered Cooperstown back onto its feet. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis opened the ceremony by dedicating the museum to the country's love of the game. Twenty-five men from the first three induction classes, eleven of them still living, were honored with bronze plaques, including Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson, the five originally elected back in 1936. The whole spectacle rested on a story that was never true: that Civil War general Abner Doubleday invented baseball in a Cooperstown cow pasture in 1839, a claim historians had already debunked but that a village desperate for tourists was happy to keep repeating.