Offered here is one of the very first Haskell balls made, with a hand wound rubber core and mesh pattern gutta percha cover.  As the first rubber-core golf ball, the Haskell holds a landmark position in the history of the game.  Sold by the B.F. Goodrich Company, the Haskell was the ball that rendered gutta percha golf balls obsolete.

Most of the early Haskells have a bramble cover, but the first Haskells produced had a mesh cover. On page 54 of his book, The Curious History of the Golf Ball, John Stuart Martin explains how the cores of the first Haskell's were hand wound by a group of ladies and then enclosed in a mesh gutta percha cover.  He further explained why the mesh pattern Haskells were short lived and replaced with a bramble pattern:

"Until the Gammeter [winding] machine was completed, and duplicated many times, golf ball production at the Goodrich plant was painfully slow, limited to the digital [hand-winding] efforts of Emmet Junkins' female task force. But even before mass production could be got rolling, [Haskell] displayed and dispensed his creations far and wide. In the Foreword to this book, Chick Evans relates one bit of Coburn Haskell's salesmanship, at the Edgewater club north of Chicago. Haskell was also a member of the Chicago Golf Club, where Jim Foulis was the presiding pro. And it was here that a grave deficiency of the early Haskell balls was accidentally discovered and remedied by Foulis.

"The early Haskell was, as noted by Evans, 'a fitful ball, going abruptly and irregularly.' Although its gutta percha cover was pressed on in the same grooved molds as used for most gutties of the day, it exhibited the same tendency to duck and dart as the earliest smooth gutties had done, before they were grooved.

Jim Foulis happened to possess, and to prefer, a guttie mold of the improved brambled ‘Agrippa' pattern, with raised blackberry bumps on the ball instead of graving narrow, shallow meridians. One day in his shop at Wheaton, when he was remolding a batch of old gutties, Foulis chanced (without noticing it) to include and to bramble a used Haskell. In play, this ball performed so prodigiously that Foulis cut it open, and discovered what had happened. Unwittingly he had given the Haskell ball the kind of surface its liveliness required to make it fly far and true. Thereafter, all early Haskells were called in to be brambled, and the ball of the future was truly on its way."

Marked “Haskell” across one pole and “Pat Apr 11, 1899, across the other, this ball is in outstanding condition, all things considered. It shows little use and much of its original paint remains.  More important, the ball is not cracked open.  When found today, the covers on the earliest mesh pattern Haskells are often split open, demonstrating the fragile nature of the earliest Haskell balls which were in many respects hand made.  A sterling example of this historic ball.