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Lawn Tennis and Seeds for Your Lawn

Livingston's Seed Store, 11th Annual Seed Catalogue, 1898

The game of tennis as we know it today caught on in the United States in the 1880s:

In America in 1874 Mary Ewing Outerbridge, a young socialite, returned from Bermuda where she met Major Wingfield. She laid out a tennis court at the Staten Island Cricket Club in New Brighton Staten Island, New York. The exact location of the club was under what is now the Staten Island Ferry terminal. The first American National tournament in 1880 was played there. An Englishman named O.E Woodhouse won the singles match. There was also a doubles match which was won by a local pair. There were different rules at each club. The ball in Boston was larger than the one normally used in NY. On May 21, 1881, the United States National Lawn Tennis Association (now the United States Tennis Association) was formed to standardize the rules and organize competitions.—Wikipedia – Tennis

This seed catalog from the Libraries' trade literature collection highlights how popular the sport had already become in the United States in 1898. Seeds were available from Livingston's Seed Store's 11th Annual Seed Catalogue, for a large neighborhood tennis court, as well as growing garden vegetables and the grass to make one's own home court advantage.

—Elizabeth Periale

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