UGA Gets Footage of Possible Earliest Baseball Movie in Georgia

A 26-second film of a game played by African-American employees at Pebble Hill Plantation, circa 1919, may be the earliest moving images of baseball filmed in Georgia.

The 28 mm home movie, part of the Pebble Hill Plantation Film Collection (circa 1917-circa 1976), was donated last year to the University of Georgia Libraries’ Walter J. Brown Media Archives, the only public institution in Georgia devoted entirely to preserving unique moving images and sound from the state.

Pebble Hill, a hunting plantation located just outside Thomasville, was bought in 1896 by Howard Melville Hanna of Cleveland, Ohio, as a winter home. In 1901, he gave the property to his daughter, Kate Hanna Ireland, and her children, Livingston and Elizabeth “Pansy” Ireland.  Pebble Hill’s trustees donated the family’s films to the Media Archives to preserve their unique scenes of the family and property.

To see the film, click here.