I love a good local legend.
Especially the kind that makes you stop mid-sip of coffee and say:
Wait. What?
And this one certainly did.
Because according to a story that has circulated around Penn Yan for decades, one of the most recognizable objects in sports history—the humble peach basket that gave
basketball its name—may have had roots right here in our little corner of the Finger Lakes.
Yes.
Penn Yan.
Not Springfield, Massachusetts.
Not New York City.
Not some great sporting-goods manufacturer.
Penn Yan, New York.
Or at least...
that's the story.
And you know me.
Once I hear something like that, there is absolutely no leaving it alone.
So grab your coffee.
We have a little historical mystery to solve.
First, Meet Edson Potter
Our story begins with a Penn Yan businessman named
Edson Potter.
Potter wasn't a fictional character added to make a good story better. He was very real—and he was a prominent member of the Penn Yan business community.
An 1892 history of the area identifies
Potter, Kinne & Kendall as one of the largest lumber dealers in the village and says that business succeeded an earlier partnership between
R. B. Lefferts and Edson Potter.
And Potter left another piece of himself behind in Penn Yan.
In 1888, he built the handsome brick Victorian house at
160 Main Street, which still stands today in the Penn Yan Historic District.
By 1913, the Penn Yan directory listed:
POTTER, EDSON (Elizabeth F), president, Yates Lumber Co., home 160 Main.
His son Rexford was secretary of the company and lived at the same address.
So Edson Potter?
Definitely real.
Penn Yan lumberman?
Absolutely.
Basket manufacturer?
Well...
That's where things get interesting.
Meanwhile, 250 Miles Away...
In December 1891, a 30-year-old physical education instructor named
James Naismith had a problem.
Naismith was teaching at what was then the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts.
New England winter had driven his students indoors, and they were restless.
Marching wasn't cutting it.
Calisthenics weren't exactly thrilling them.
And trying to play football indoors was probably not going to end well.
Naismith's boss challenged him to invent something better: an indoor game that would provide exercise, hold the students' interest and avoid the bone-crunching roughness of football and rugby.
So Naismith started thinking.
He borrowed ideas from rugby, lacrosse, soccer and a childhood game called
Duck on a Rock.
Gradually, a new game began forming in his head.
There would be a ball.
Players wouldn't be allowed to run while carrying it.
And instead of simply throwing the ball straight at a goal, players would have to
arc it upward into an elevated target.
Brilliant.
Except Naismith needed something for the target.
And this is where Penn Yan enters the story.
Maybe.
The Penn Yan Version
In 1953, writer
A. Glenn Rogers published a wonderful little story called The Penn Yan Peach Basket.
And according to Rogers, something remarkable happened in 1891.
Edson Potter was supposedly traveling on business, carrying one of his company's peach baskets as a sales sample.
He stopped at a fruit market in
New Haven, Connecticut.
And there Potter encountered another shopper.
That man's name?
James Naismith.
Yes.
That James Naismith.
According to Rogers' account, Naismith noticed Potter's peach basket and immediately became interested.
Naismith supposedly explained that he was developing a new indoor game but hadn't settled on the right kind of goal.
Then he looked at Potter's basket.
Perhaps this was the answer.
The story says Naismith asked Potter to send him several baskets after Potter returned to Penn Yan.
Potter agreed.
And once home, according to the tale, he shipped
a dozen Penn Yan peach baskets to Naismith.
Two of those baskets supposedly became the goals for Naismith's new game.
Basket.
Ball.
Basketball.
Oh, how I wanted that story to be true.
But then I kept digging.
And found a problem.
A pretty big one.
Houston—or Perhaps Penn Yan—We Have a Problem
The traditional story identifies Potter as proprietor of the
Yates Lumber Company and says the peach basket he carried in 1891 was one of the company's products.
Except contemporary Penn Yan history gives us a very inconvenient date.
1909.
According to Stafford C. Cleveland's history of Penn Yan, the Yates Lumber Company
began making baskets in 1909.
Not 1891.
1909.
Its first year's production was already an astonishing
1.6 million baskets, and by 1915 the company's estimated annual output had reached
9 million.
Even better, the Yates County Chronicle reported in February 1909 that the Yates Lumber Company was branching into basket manufacturing and that a company was being organized to manufacture lumber and grape baskets using automatic stapling machinery.
That is contemporary evidence.
And it creates an 18-year hole in our lovely story.
Basketball:
1891.
Yates Lumber begins making baskets:
1909.
Oops.
But Don't Throw Away the Peach Basket Just Yet
Because here's where our mystery gets even better.
While the
Yates Lumber Company apparently wasn't making baskets in 1891...
Penn Yan certainly was.
And had been for years.
I found an advertisement in the Penn Yan Express from
May 10, 1883 offering for sale:
“The entire machinery of the Yates County Basket Factory.”
That's eight years before Naismith invented basketball.
There was also basket manufacturing along the Keuka Lake Outlet.
Historian Frances Dumas wrote that a former plaster mill there was converted into a
box and basket factory during the 1880s to serve the booming fruit trade. Tons of fresh fruit were leaving the region by rail, and all that fruit needed something to travel in.
That makes perfect sense.
Think about Penn Yan and the surrounding countryside in the late nineteenth century.
Grapes.
Peaches.
Apples.
Railroads.
Steamships.
Agriculture wasn't simply something happening in the fields and vineyards.
It created industries around it.
Grow the fruit.
Pick the fruit.
Pack the fruit.
Ship the fruit.
And before you could ship it...
somebody had to make the basket.
Penn Yan Became REALLY Good at Baskets
Eventually, Penn Yan became something of a basket-making powerhouse.
By the early twentieth century, local history boasted that Penn Yan manufactured
more varieties of fruit packages than any other town in the United States.
Think about that for a minute.
Little Penn Yan.
Making baskets and fruit packages that traveled throughout the country.
The Yates Lumber Company became one of the giants. Guile & Windnagle operated another substantial factory, manufacturing splint baskets and fruit packages and shipping its products across the United States and into Canada.
The basket business became so closely associated with Penn Yan that perhaps it isn't surprising that one particular basket eventually became attached to one particularly famous story.
But we're still left with one enormous question.
Where Did Naismith's Original Peach Baskets Actually Come From?
Here we have something even better than folklore.
We have
James Naismith himself.
Springfield College preserves Naismith's account of what happened.
Naismith had already decided that his new game needed an elevated horizontal goal.
On the morning he was preparing to try the game, he asked the school's janitor for
two boxes approximately 18 inches square.
The janitor couldn't find them.
But he had something else.
Two old peach baskets.
Naismith took them.
He nailed one to the lower rail of the gymnasium balcony at each end of the floor.
That railing happened to be
10 feet high.
And more than 130 years later?
A regulation basketball hoop is still...
10 feet high.
Naismith even described that first game decades later in the only known recording of his voice, now preserved by the Library of Congress.
And nowhere in the established Naismith account that I could find does Edson Potter appear.
No chance meeting in New Haven.
No Penn Yan salesman.
No shipment of a dozen baskets.
Instead, the baskets were already sitting in a storeroom in Springfield.
So Is the Penn Yan Story Wrong?
Maybe.
But I think the better answer is:
We don't know exactly how the story began.
The earliest detailed version I've been able to locate so far is A. Glenn Rogers' account published in
1953—62 years after basketball was invented. It was later republished in Life in the Finger Lakes, with historical photographs credited to the Yates County Genealogical and Historical Society/Oliver House Museum.
And there is an important distinction here.
A story being old does not necessarily make it false.
Families remember things.
Businesses pass stories from one generation to another.
Communities preserve memories that never make it into newspapers.
It's entirely possible that Rogers was recording an older Penn Yan tradition.
But right now, I haven't found an 1891 letter from Potter.
I haven't found a Yates Lumber invoice addressed to Naismith.
I haven't found a Springfield receipt for Penn Yan baskets.
And most importantly, the
1909 start date for Yates Lumber's basket production contradicts an important detail of the 1953 version.
So I'm not ready to hang a sign at the village limits proclaiming:
WELCOME TO PENN YAN — WE INVENTED BASKETBALL.
Tempting though it may be.
But Could the Original Baskets Still Have Been Made Here?
Now that is the question I can't completely dismiss.
The Springfield janitor apparently retrieved two existing peach baskets from storage.
Who manufactured them?
I haven't found documentation answering that.
And Penn Yan was already manufacturing baskets before 1891.
So while there is currently no evidence I can find proving Springfield's original baskets came from Penn Yan, there is also a fascinating unanswered question about
where those baskets were manufactured and how they reached Springfield.
That's different from the Edson Potter story.
And it's worth keeping those two questions separate.
Did Edson Potter personally give Naismith the idea for peach-basket goals?
The evidence I've found doesn't support that claim—and some of it directly conflicts with the later story.
Could the actual peach baskets sitting in that Springfield storeroom have originated in Penn Yan or elsewhere in the Finger Lakes?
Possible.
But until somebody finds a manufacturer's mark, receipt, letter, inventory or contemporary account...
we simply don't know.
And I rather love that.
A Keuka Roots Reflection
Maybe that's why I enjoy digging into these old stories so much.
History isn't always neat.
Sometimes you begin researching because you want to prove a wonderful story true.
And instead you discover something better.
A mystery.
I can picture Penn Yan in 1891.
Fruit coming in from farms and vineyards.
Lumber stacked in yards.
Factories humming along the Outlet.
Baskets being assembled by the hundreds and thousands.
Rail cars waiting to carry Finger Lakes produce—and the baskets holding it—far beyond Yates County.
And about 250 miles away in Springfield, Massachusetts, a young instructor is staring at two ordinary peach baskets.
He nails them to a balcony.
Hands his students a soccer ball.
And unknowingly creates a sport that will eventually be played before millions of people around the world.
Were those two baskets from Penn Yan?
I wish I could tell you yes.
I can't.
At least not yet.
But Penn Yan was making baskets before basketball existed.
Edson Potter was a real Penn Yan lumberman.
Penn Yan would become one of America's great basket-manufacturing communities.
And somehow, decades later, Potter and one of those Penn Yan peach baskets became woven into the origin story of basketball.
How?
That's the part of the story I'm still chasing.
And somewhere—perhaps tucked inside an old business ledger, forgotten newspaper, family letter or dusty box in an archive—there may still be an answer.
Until then, the next time you're sitting in a gym and somebody sinks a three-pointer, take a look at that hoop.
And remember the wonderfully tantalizing question from our little crooked-lake corner of the world:
Did Penn Yan put the “basket” in basketball?
Maybe not in quite the way the old story tells it.
But I wouldn't toss that Penn Yan peach basket out just yet.
Stay Rooted. Stay Keuka.™
Small Towns. Big Stories. One Crooked Lake.™
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