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| NC A&M's 1895 football team [photo: NC State Special Collections Archive.] |
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© Tim Peeler, 2021
The NC State-Wake Forest football rivalry is the second longest continuous rivalry in college football, contested every year since 1910, through war, wind and woe.
What of the first meeting in the 114-game series, the only game between the two teams played before the turn of the 20th century? Surely, there is an interesting backstory to why these close neighbors played just once in 1895, not again until two games in 1908 and then continuously since 1910.
Indeed.
On Friday, Oct. 18, 1895—the day before the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (A&M College, now NC State) hosted Wake Forest at Raleigh’s Athletic Park—the faculty at Wake Forest announced that following the Saturday afternoon contest down in the state capital, the Baptist football team would no longer be allowed to leave campus to play games, effectively banning varsity athletics at the evangelical school.
“The faculty allowed today’s game in Raleigh on account of peculiar circumstances, but took the following action with reference to the future: That after Oct. 19th our students be allowed to play no match game of football except on their own grounds.”
In effect, that decision shut down football for the next 12 years at the Baptist-based school in northern Wake County, becoming the state’s second religiously based school to ban the sport. Methodist-affiliated Trinity (now Duke) had chased off its president, John Franklin Crowell, who introduced college football to the state in 1888, because of his devotion to and promotion of football as a premier form of physical activity. His replacement, John Carlisle Kilgo, immediately banned the sport at Trinity in 1894.
“I have uncompromising objections to the modern football contests,” said Kilgo, hired from South Carolina’s Wofford College.
Trinity did not reinstitute the sport until 1920, when it decided it could no longer tell its student body, many of whom had served in The Great War in Europe, that football was too dangerous for them.
The faculty at Baptist-affiliated Wake Forest agreed that football was in direct opposition to its Christian values. As reported in The North Carolinian, a Raleigh publication of the day: “Wake Forest College steps into line with a rule forbidding students to play football except on the College ground. This may seem hard on the boys but in a little while they will know that it is not. Last year, 43 men were killed in the game in four months. Only 12 men were killed in Spanish bullfights in the entire year.” [NOTE: These numbers are unverified by any other published work.]
Football, of course, was still in its infancy, the rules still morphing from rugby into something vaguely resembling the game played today with the 61 rules established in 1876. It was unrelentingly brutal for the players who had little more protection than padded pants and shirts, with no helmets. Things got especially bad when Princeton’s popular blocking tactics of the 1880s evolved into “the flying wedge.”
Making things worse was the rule forbidding free substitution. Once a player was removed from a game, he could not return, which meant many of the best players who were hurt stayed on the field until they were unconscious and had to be carried off on a stretcher.
The game became so dangerous that President Grover Cleveland Alexander banned the Army-Navy game in 1893. Harvard banned football the same year following a bloody game with Yale that is often referred to as the most brutal game ever played. In 1894, the football rules committee banned all forms of wedge blocking.
Noted sportsman and future president Theodore Roosevelt wrote in the Dec. 23, 1893, issue of Harper’s Weekly: “The brutality must be done away with and the danger minimized…The rules for football ought to probably be altered so as to do away with the present mass [or wedge] play, and, I think, also the present system of interference.”
Most evangelical schools, like Wake Forest and Trinity, took a dim view of football. The Western North Carolina Conference of the Methodists, in particular, thought football was “a source of evil, and no little evil.”
Wake, Trinity, Wofford and Furman all banned the sport for decades. The Georgia General Assembly even passed a bill banning the sport and Virginia considered something similar after a player died of a fractured skull during an 1897 game in Atlanta between the states’ two universities in Atlanta. The Georgia governor vetoed the bill after the mother of the player who died wrote a letter in support of keeping the sport. “Grant me this right to request that my boy’s death should not be used to defeat the most cherished object of his life,” wrote Rosalind Burns Gammon, who is remembered as “the woman who saved football in Georgia.”
Still, the Wake Forest faculty allowed the one-game 1895 season to continue due to “peculiar circumstances.” What were they? While the news reports of the time don’t specify, it likely was because the football team from Richmond College had already boarded its train to travel to North Carolina for a crazy weekend of round-robin football played in the (not-yet-named) Triangle.
The season started in the state the previous week when the University in Chapel Hill beat A&M 36-0 on University Day. The game was notable because it was the debut of both Teisaku Sugishita, believed to be the first native of Japan to ever play in a college football game, and A&M’s newly selected red-and-white school colors, which replaced the original pink and blue colors from 1892-93 and the brown and white of 1894.
Football began in earnest when Richmond played A&M College the following Friday, with Wake Forest’s captain, John Gore, serving as the game’s referee and former A&M coach and noted Raleigh lawyer Perrin Busbee as umpire.
The game had a rocky start as Richmond’s train stalled out en route to Raleigh and the team, wearing its olive and orange colors, arrived an hour late for the 4 p.m. start at Raleigh’s Athletic Park, A&M’s regular home field prior to the Riddick Field’s opening in 1907.
The park, located across the street from Oakwood Cemetery, just north of downtown, was the regular host of college and professional baseball games and college football games for A&M, the University, Wake Forest and Trinity.
Kickoff was moved to 5 p.m. and the two halves were trimmed to 20 minutes each.
Both teams took a long time to work out the stiffness in their joints, as neither team scored a touchdown—then worth four points—in the first 35 minutes of the game. Coach Bart Gatlin's A&M team, playing without one starter who was sick and another who was ejected for allegedly slugging a Richmond opponent, finally settled the matter by recovering a fumble at the 7-yard-line with five minutes to play, then advancing it for both a touchdown and two-point drop kick for the exciting 6-0 victory.
The game attracted hundreds of fans, with “A&M rooters there with streamers of white and red.” Much of the crowd came from Raleigh’s women’s colleges, all of whom were admitted without paying the 25-cent entry fee.
The 75 or so A&M students in attendance broke into one of its many school yells following the season’s first victory.
Kak-y-Kak
Kak-Bo-Kak-Bo-Kak!
Kak-y-Kak Kak-Bo-Kak-Bo-Kak!
Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!
A and MC! A and MC!
Dixie!
Don’t ask me what any of that means.
The next day, fewer people paid to see A&M and Wake Forest play at the same field, and maybe that’s why the outcome was relatively unexciting.
“A good sprinkling of the wearers of black and gold were on the field to cheer their team to victory—but in vain,” reported the News & Observer the next day.
Both teams scored touchdowns in the first half, both teams missed their two-point drop kicks and neither team came close to scoring in the second half, as the game ended in a 4-4 tie.
A&M’s touchdown was scored by junior Bradley Wootten, who was one of two students who had petitioned the faculty to change the school colors to red and white early in the semester. Gore scored Wake Forest only touchdown.
Back Syd Alexander, namesake of a current NC State residence hall, was A&M’s top performer in the game, as both runner and punter.
Meanwhile, in Chapel Hill, Richmond played its second game in as many days as well, losing 34-0 to North Carolina on the dusty grounds of the school’s athletic field.
Games on consecutive days during those short seasons were not unusual, as regional and interstate travel was particularly difficult in the days when the only way move from town to town was on a Southern Railway train. Those consecutive games that allowed no recovery time for players only added to the brutality of the sport.
Both A&M and the University continued their seasons by hitting the rails for out-of-state games. Carolina played at Vanderbilt, at Sewanee and two games against Georgia over the next two weeks. A&M played its first ever out-of-state game, arranging a special train to Atlanta for the Cotton States and International Exposition, the fourth world’s fair held in the American South. The team had no opponent before arriving in Atlanta, but quickly arranged a contest with the Virginia Military Institute, whose team was already in town for the exposition.
After the season, NC State’s faculty voted to end varsity football as well, but that ban lasted less than a year. The team played one game in 1896, a 6-0 win over Guilford. North Carolina never banned the sport on its campus, often ridiculing those who did in the pages of The Daily Tar Heel.
“The attitude of a certain educational institution in this State in slurring at foot-ball is to a great degree sour grapish,” read an Oct. 12, 1895, editorial. “This same institution was the most enthusiastic advocate of foot-ball until its defeats came thick and fast. Then its ardor for the game waved, and now its attitude is one of open hostility.
“It doesn’t require a historian to know the college to which we refer.”
Wake Forest eventually ended its ban in 1908, when it played a game against North Carolina; two games against A&M’s Aggies, losing 76-0 and 25-0; and two games against Davidson in Charlotte. Two seasons later, the unbroken streak of games against NC State began.
Sources for this blog post include the archives of the Raleigh News & Observer, the Daily Tar Heel, NC State’s Red and White, The North Carolinian of Raleigh and the following historical essays.
"Unrelenting War on Football": The Death of Richard Von Gammon and the Attempt to Ban Football in Georgia Author(s): Christopher C. Meyers Source: The Georgia Historical Quarterly , WINTER 2009, Vol. 93, No. 4 (WINTER 2009), pp. 388-407 Published by: Georgia Historical Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27809140
John Franklin Crowell, Methodism, and the Football Controversy at Trinity College, 1887-1894 Author(s): Jim L. Sumner Source: Journal of Sport History , Spring, 1990, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 5-20 Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43609402
Great article. Fascinating. I can't imagine playing football with today's gear.
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