![old monopoly game old monopoly game](https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/U4e72fd20dbe74de894d41d6ad38b0375k/Hasbro-Original-MONOPOLY-BUILDER-Board-Game-8-years-free-shipping-F1696190.jpg)
One descendant of the Wharton Woodies lineage is the game created by the Taylor brothers, who learned to play Monopoly during the summer of 1920 at their family’s summer home in the Pocono Lake Preserve. Nearing’s use of the game inspired his students to make their own wooden boards, which Holcombe has dubbed the “Wharton Woodies.” Eventually, the handmade, or “folk,” games became known as Monopoly and spread among university students. (His radical political views would later get him sacked from Penn, and he would go on to become a 1960s counterculture icon as the author, with his wife, Helen, of the back-to-the-land bible Living the Good Life.) (Magie was a follower of journalist and economist Henry George, who wrote about poverty and inequality and proposed replacing property taxes on buildings with a land-value tax.) Several years later, Scott Nearing, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, began using the game as a teaching tool to critique capitalism and monopolies. To fully appreciate the significance of the Taylor brothers’ game requires some knowledge of Monopoly’s history.Īccording to Holcombe, who’s writing a book on the topic, the real estate empire-building game many of us grew up playing is the Parker Brothers board, first marketed after the company bought the patent held by Charles Darrow, a Philadelphian who often gets credit for inventing the game.īut before Darrow’s Monopoly, there was the Landlord’s Game, created by Elizabeth Magie in the early 1900s and first patented in 1904. The word is inscribed in black capital letters in the center of the nearly century-old wooden board whose design reflects Philadelphia and the western suburbs around Haverford, including nods to School Lane, the historic King of Prussia Inn, and the long-gone Café La Reviere. “This is the only known folk Monopoly game board with ‘MONOPOLY’ printed on it,” he says. According to Holcombe, who alerted the College about his find in August, the Taylor board is truly one of a kind. It took him three years to piece together the game’s history and trace it to Haverford.
![old monopoly game old monopoly game](https://i.etsystatic.com/9295891/r/il/d49fbc/1940459061/il_fullxfull.1940459061_jswl.jpg)
There was only one problem: “There was very little provenance on it, which then sent me on a journey to find everything I could about it.” Holcombe, a Houston management consultant who also owns a first-edition Parker Brothers and other derivative games based on Monopoly. In 2014, the game turned up in an eBay auction and was snapped up for $3,500 by collector Malcolm G.
![old monopoly game old monopoly game](https://i.etsystatic.com/5281890/r/il/45393c/2552717920/il_570xN.2552717920_hk4y.jpg)
But for more than 90 years it was believed that the actual physical game-the board and playing pieces-had been lost. Wasserman ’83 that appeared in a 1986 issue of Haverford magazine, that specific mention of the Taylor brothers’ game came to figure as evidence in a trademark infringement lawsuit involving Parker Brothers. And according to an article about the origins of Monopoly by Roy S. Its existence was documented in an entry in the 1924 Record, the Haverford yearbook. Part of a long history of what are known as “folk Monopoly” boards, the game was created in 1921 by brothers Edward “Ted” Taylor, Class of 1922, and Lawrence “Larry” Taylor, Class of 1924.
![old monopoly game old monopoly game](https://i.etsystatic.com/9295891/r/il/c12a9e/1940459179/il_fullxfull.1940459179_sm5u.jpg)
presidents as playing pieces, the College’s nearby Walnut Avenue on its wooden board, and “money” made from cardstock once used by the College’s Emergency Unit.