Follow up Article on John Cunningham Early American Racket Maker
First Published October, 2021
At the 2019 annual Tennis Collectors of America meeting held at the New Orleans Tennis Club, I gave a presentation titled “Early American Racket Makers.” In that talk, I not only chronologically identified the first American lawn tennis racket makers, I also documented that John Cunningham and his son John W. Cunningham of New York City were making lawn tennis rackets in 1877 and perhaps as early as 1876.
In the subsequent two years since my New Orleans presentation, I haven’t discovered any evidence of an earlier American racket maker. However, early in 2021, I acquired a second Cunningham tennis artifact that provides further insight into the Cunningham’s racket making history.
The pictured handmade multiple racket press has exact same “J. Cunningham New York” maker’s mark that his racket has, plus a design that features a unicorn and a shakefork (the Y shaped figure).
I discovered that the design was actually the family crest of an Irish branch of the Cunningham family, which was based on the Scottish Cunningham family crest. Clan Cunningham originated in the 12th century in Scotland, some of whose members began emigrating across the Irish Sea to Ireland in 1610.
John and Mary Whitney Cunningham were Irish descendants of those Scottish immigrants when they married in New York City in the early 1850’s where their son John W. was born in 1856. Twenty-one years later, when the Cunninghams went into the sporting goods business, it appears that they adopted the Irish Cunningham family crest as part of their maker’s mark.
As you can see in the attached photo, the Cunningham lawn tennis racket fits easily into the Cunningham press. In my 2019 presentation, I stated that I had been collecting and researching tennis rackets since 1989 and wondered why I have only seen three Cunningham lawn tennis rackets in the previous 30 years.
I then went on to point out some clues that perhaps the Cunninghams had switched their racket making efforts from lawn tennis towards the game of “rackets.” Their baseball equipment advertising in the 1877 Rand’s New York Business Directory demonstrates that they were certainly open to making non-tennis sporting goods.
A rackets racket is 30.5 inches in length with a round head that measures seven inches in diameter. When I disassembled the Cunningham press, I was surprised to see that the wooden dividers had oxidized in a circle around the head of a racket with a diameter of seven inches!
While it only makes sense that a small maker like J. Cunningham would sell the same press to their lawn tennis customers, as well as rackets players, it appears that this press was actually used for rackets rackets.
This discovery certainly adds additional weight to the possibility that the Cunninghams steered their racket making away from lawn tennis towards the game of rackets early in the company’s history.
I have continued to research this topic since my New Orleans presentation and I am even more confident now than I was two years ago that John Cunningham is the first identified American maker of lawn tennis rackets and his son, John W, the second.
Good Collecting.
