Prelude to Super Sunday: Old Time Football in Taunton, Massachusetts
By William F. Hanna
By the late twentieth century football had replaced baseball as the national game, and so now each February we get the Super Bowl, a football, entertainment and commercial extravaganza so grand that the annual contests must be counted in Roman numerals (LIX this year). But it wasn’t always like this. In fact, there was a time, especially in the two decades surrounding 1900, when the games could have been mistaken for gang fights, and teams had the casualty lists to prove it. In a sport that’s still criticized for its violence, even then there were fans of the game who, while charmed by its simplicity, were afraid that its brutality would keep it from becoming widely popular in the United States.
Football is a game for the young, and it developed gradually among Taunton boys. The first football field in the city, cleared in the late 1880s, was located on Church Green, behind Bristol Academy, which is today the home of the Old Colony History Museum. The academy had a team, but declining enrollment limited the success of its program. In the early days the Bristol team played a squad from Taunton High School, but by the late 1890s the disparity in the size of the schools ended the rivalry.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century and into the first of the twentieth, the academy’s gridiron served as Taunton High School’s home field. As high school athletic programs developed slowly, one of the most anticipated games of the season took place on Thanksgiving Day. It featured an annual contest between the THS football team and recent alumni of that school. It was played in every kind of weather but even in the best of times field conditions were never very good. The field was small, and a brook ran across and below Summer Street and then passed under the gridiron. William Hale Reed, who played there, remembered almost fifty years later that players always had to contend with water, ice or mud at one end of the field.¹ Newspaper accounts of games during these years often referred to the field as a “mud bowl,” and precipitation made matters even worse. A writer for the Taunton Daily Gazette reported that spectators at the Thanksgiving 1898 contest had “enjoyed it hugely, after . . . there had been a cessation of crawling around in the mud and water. . . . “²
It was raining on the day of the 1898 game and the reporter noticed the several Taunton High School girls who were in attendance at the game. Because of the weather the principal of Bristol Academy allowed the girls to enter the building and watch the contest from windows facing the field. Because there was no outside seating, spectators stood behind ropes placed at the edge of the playing field. Their cooperation was never certain, however, and as the game’s popularity grew it was necessary to hire police officers to keep fans behind the ropes.³
One of the stars of that 1898 season was Paul Bunker, whose athleticism so impressed scouts from West Point that he was invited to apply to the United States Military Academy after only his junior year at Taunton High. He went on to earn Walter Camp All-America honors for the army team before graduating in 1903. Bunker died as a prisoner of the Japanese forty years later.
Bunker was gone by the time the high school’s 1902 team took the field. Fred Foubert, a correspondent for the Taunton Daily Gazette in the 1960s, has called this one of the greatest football teams in the city’s history, but they played in ways that the modern fan would never recognize. For example, players didn’t wear helmets, just a rubber nose guard that fastened at the back of their heads. Shoulder pads were for softies. Foubert said that some running backs wore thick leather belts around their waists because as they approached the opposing players, their teammates would grab the belt and try to pull them through the defensive line. Also, wrote Foubert, if the team’s quarterback was small enough, the offensive linemen would gather together, pick him up, and attempt to throw him over the defense.⁴
Taken nationally, this was the period during which football was subjected to the loudest calls for reform, and with good reason. David Maraniss, in his fine biography of Jim Thorpe, writes that between 1901 and 1905, there were seventy-one recorded deaths attributed to football, a toll that was accompanied by a gruesome catalog of injuries. As football clubs and town teams organized industrial league rivalries, the game became synonymous with unchecked violence everywhere it was played. “Teams would line up head-to-head,” writes Maraniss, “with no neutral zone and bang away at each other, hold, scrap, lock arms for brutal arrow-like flying wedges, slug, bite, pile on, and attack with deadly force.” So concerning was the mayhem that even a fan as dedicated as President Theodore Roosevelt warned that the game might not survive if the violence wasn’t brought under control.⁵
While there were no lives lost to football in Taunton, the game was still pretty rough. If, as Foubert writes, the 1902 Taunton High School team was among the city’s best ever, their regular season game schedule must have been grueling because they were struggling by the time the Thanksgiving Day alumni contest was played. Playing on the academy field in front of a large crowd, the THS “old-timers,” several of whom had recently graduated, took a lot of good-natured ribbing from spectators. They were, wrote the Gazette reporter, an “all-star aggregation of super-annuated has-beens,” but thanks to injuries, they easily defeated the high schoolers by a score of 7–2. According to the reporter, while none of the alumni players had suffered injuries in the game, “several of the school team were done up.” This included one of the school’s star players who had suffered a broken collarbone on the team’s first possession. So depleted was the THS squad that one alumnus had to switch teams in order for the game to continue.⁶
Thanks to Fred Foubert, we might wonder if the THS squad was short a couple of players on that Thanksgiving Day. Foubert writes that it was in 1902 when Taunton High School last employed “ringers” on its teams. Many clubs brought in talented older players who weren’t students and who had no affiliation with the school. According to Foubert, at one time Taunton High had two, while some other schools had as many as three ringers. One of the better THS ringers, out of school for three or four years, allegedly had to shave before each game. Another one decided to occasionally sit in on classes, just for old times’ sake.⁷
Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century better equipment (protective helmets, for example), more stringent rules and a wider range of offensive strategies, including the forward pass, made the game a bit safer and more popular. In Taunton, football fields were placed off Ashland Street and at the Bristol County Fair Grounds, located at the end of present-day Kilmer Avenue. Among several other organizations, teams were organized by the YMCA, the Taunton Young Men’s Guild and the Whittenton Association. Many of these teams were stocked with former high school or college players.
One of Taunton’s better-known teams during this period was the Cygnet Club, which was organized in Whittenton and played its home games at a field on West Britannia Street. Several of its members worked nearby at Reed & Barton Silversmiths, but the team had a wide following even beyond the city’s North End. Cygnets believed that clothes make the man, even on the gridiron, and as such the club held dances and fund raisers to buy uniforms and equipment. Players wore turtle neck woolen sweaters, canvas vests and pants padded with rattan sticks down the front, heavy woolen stockings, shin guards and football shoes.
Cygnets were men who labored mostly in the city’s mills and factories, often working fifty-hour weeks. Leading up to the first game of the season, they practiced on Saturday mornings, but in the weeks after opening day players could often be seen practicing under the light of the street lamps on West Britannia Street. The Cygnets only fielded teams in 1910, ’11 and ’12, but in that time they established strong rivalries with football clubs in Attleboro and Norwood. After their games, many Cygnets would hop on a street car bound for Dighton Rock Park and an evening of dancing.⁸
So over time, the Wild West atmosphere diminished, the game’s popularity grew and the alumni game faded away, as did the academy and its field. With the coming of the automobile, Taunton High School established rivalries with teams in Brockton, Fall River, New Bedford, Middleborough, and Mansfield. Soon radio and then television would capture the game and deliver it away from muddy fields. College and professional football would be broadcast into the homes of millions, each year promising yet another Super Sunday.
End Notes
¹William Hale Reed, “Saturday Jottings,” Taunton Daily Gazette, 29 November 1947.
² Taunton Daily Gazette, 25 November 1898.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Fred Foubert, “1902 THS Team Remembered as Ranking With Best in US,” Taunton Daily Gazette, undated, found in OCHM file V F985; hereinafter cited as Foubert, “1902 THS.”
⁵David Maraniss, Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 70.
⁶Taunton Daily Gazette, 28 November 1902.
⁷Foubert, “1902 THS.”
⁸Fred Foubert, “Team Hit Like Bulldozer in Days of Cygnet Club,” Taunton Daily Gazette, undated, found in OCHM file V F985.
