New Ulm Sports Central - Preserving and Sharing New Ulm Area Sports History

Parts of the baseball history from the New Ulm Sports Central preservation initiative is expected to go “major league” with the opening of the new Minnesota Twins baseball stadium in 2010.
The stadium will feature a “Town Ball Tavern” which may be open year-around. The Twins have hired a design firm and photo consultants to develop the décor. They have also engaged Armand Peterson, one of the authors of the “Town Ball” book to help find suitable photographs of Minnesota’s non-professional baseball for use in the décor. Peterson spent Thursday in New Ulm working with New Ulm Sports Central president Herb Schaper and member Jim Aufderheide for material from this area and left with a CD of high resolution scans that will be considered.

Included is material in private collections being historically preserved by Sports Central and some older material in the Brown County Historical Society collection. Schaper worked with Peterson in the location and production of historic baseball photography for the book, “Town Ball, The Glory Days of Minnesota Baseball”.
Selected for consideration for display were several aerials of Johnson Park in New Ulm when it was opened circa 1940, a crowd scene, an aerial of the Stark baseball field, a ground-view of the Essig baseball diamond, team pictures of 1980 Kaiserhoff state champions and 1953 state tournament participant Inger Indians and a picture of four the Kaiserhoff 1980 players who signed major league contracts (including Terry Steinbach of the Twins) , and an action picture from the 1958 state tournament at New Ulm.

Material was selected from over 5,000 sports pictures and negatives in the files of the sports central organization which is powered by the non-profit Community Research Technology. NUSC has installed computer and scanning equipment to work with the pictures and its own microfilm reader/printer for research purposes as well as the necessary file equipment. A project to catalog all the material in a search able electronic data base is underway. Initial focus area is the sports entities, including schools, located within the New Ulm public school district and is financially being currently supported solely by memberships and contributions from baseball organizations.
The material and search mechanism will be part of the organization’s website www.newulmsportscentral.com .
Comments are invited at nusc@newulmtel.net .