COCHECTON — The recent World Series brought local history to mind for Town of Cochecton Historian Kristina Snedeker. The famed baseball bat called the Louisville Slugger has its roots in the Delaware Valley. While it has been replaced as MLB’s official bat, players in the World Series still use Louisville Sluggers, as they have for a century or more.

Kristina writes, “Ramburg Lumber and Wood company in Hancock was located in the old [Standard Oil] pump station, originally owned by John D. Rockefeller.” The company is well-known for its part in the manufacture of the Louisville Slugger baseball bat. 

Elner S. Ramburg was from Chandlers Valley, Pa. He was born there in 1895 and lived there until 1934 when he moved his family to Hancock in New York.

Each year Ramburg shipped a carload of ash bats in the rough to Louisville, Kentucky, as many as 500,000 per year. Native ash trees were the basis of the wooden baseball bats, and Ramburg bought ash logs over a wide area for their production. The Hancock Herald reported in 1946 that a tree Ramburg harvested in Liberty had been five feet in diameter and yielded 340 bats. 

At Louis­ville, they were carefully graded and processed at Hillerich & Bradsby Co. (H&B).

Along with the famed Louisville Slugger, H&B produced about 200 souvenir bats per year as private gifts, honoring the year’s two major league pennant winners. 

In 1946, it was reported in the Delaware Republican-­Express of Delhi that Hamburg had received two of the souvenir bats. 

The bats were marked with the players’ autograph facsimiles, or their names in print letters in gold leaf. 

Yet there’s a more intimate connection of the baseball bat manufacturing company to Sullivan County. Kristina shared this letter from H&B sent to her great-great-grandfather, Anton Steimel of Parksville, in 1944. 

“My great-great grandfather worked for the baseball bat company in Hancock, during World War II. It was a letter for Christmas Wishes—,” Kristina writes.

The hardships people faced during the war years are evident, as the letter reads: “Dear Tony, Just a few lines to wish you and your family a very happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year. That’s about all we can do this year — just wish. And in my wishes I am including one that by this time next year the war will be over and we will be back in our normal stride.” 

The letter is signed by J.T. Rodgers, most likely John Thaddeus Rodgers who was secretary and treasurer of Hillerich & Bradsby in 1945. He was also president of the National Association of Athletic Goods Manufacturers and a director of The Athletic Institute. Rodgers had joined H&B as a salesman in 1921, working his way up to an official position in the company by 1937. 

Sadly, Rodgers didn’t live to see the end of the war. Nearly seven months after writing this letter to Steimel, Rodgers died July 12, 1945, in a hospital in New York, following a months-long illness.