By April C. Armstrong *14
Dear Mr. Mudd,
I’ve read that tailgating has origins in Princeton’s early football games, perhaps at the first intercollegiate football game against Rutgers in 1869. Is this true?
Although we know many things about the first intercollegiate football game itself, we don’t actually know much about the 1869 event’s spectators. However, it’s important to observe that the first intercollegiate game is recorded to have been the Princeton-Rutgers match of 1869, but Princetonians had been playing football in some form since as early as 1840. Thus, there would probably have already been a kind of culture that had already evolved for spectators. Still, as for what that was, we don’t have much information.
Sources don’t really say much about spectators at all at Princeton’s first games, intercollegiate or otherwise. One resource that is often useful for learning about early Princeton sports history is Athletics at Princeton: A History (1901), which provides an account of the 1869 matches with Rutgers, as taken from the Rutgers Targum. It doesn’t mention spectators. The Nassau Literary Magazine‘s contemporary account of the 1869 game notes that it was very cold, and says there were few spectators, but doesn’t tell us anything about their experience.
A culture of spectators with picnics in or around vehicles, though, does not seem to have existed yet, given accounts of a game played against Yale at Princeton in 1886. This event may also give clues to why people started packing food. If tailgating didn’t originate at Princeton, Princeton might have inspired it at least for some people, simply for being too small of a town to accommodate out of town visitors looking for lunch. The New York Times reported that there were only two places to eat locally–the Nassau Inn, which had ten seats at a lunch counter, and a restaurant that served 40. (This restaurant was, in all probability, Carl Hellerman’s establishment, Princeton House, which regularly advertised “meals at all hours” in the Princetonian of that era.) A New York restauranteur had also seized the opportunity presented by the influx of hungry people and rented a room to serve lunch, but this additional option didn’t satisfy the crowd, as the report tells the story:
The scene at this last place was indescribable. A small table stood in the room with some plates, knives, and forks upon it. A man outside the door sold tickets at $1 each. People bought them and crowded into the room. It was soon packed with soaked and steaming humanity till the atmosphere was sickening. Three unhappy waiters lugged in dishes of salad, rolls, and sandwiches. The crowd fought for viands like savages. No worse struggle occurred during the football game than occurred in this room, and many hardly got a mouthful. The efforts to get a meal in the other places were equally unhappy. The fact is that not over one quarter of the people who went to Princeton got any luncheon, and few secured any dinner before a late hour last night. Some went to grocery stores, bought crackers and cheese, and made the best meal they could with those unsatisfactory articles.
The Trenton Times explained that more people had shown up than anticipated that day. Princeton’s stands accommodated 1,800 people, but 5,000 came for the game, crowding around anywhere they could find a spot to stand and watch. When these hungry visitors clamored for food, locals panicked. There was no way to meet demand.
There is more information in the New York papers about those who came to watch the Princeton-Yale Thanksgiving Day games, which moved to Manhattan Field due to their popularity. It is frequently attested that some attendees watched from their coaches, and coaches were pretty much a mainstay of the event. For example, the New York Herald wrote on November 24, 1895 (“Yale Beats Princeton”):
The scene was the old familiar one of innumerably past Thanksgiving days, with a touch of springtime added. The weather was not football weather by any means. It was positively warm during the first half of play, a fact more appreciated by the 30,000 spectators than by the perspiring players.
Manhattan Field was packed by a crowd equal that of any Thanksgiving Day game of past years.
The coaches–something more than a score of them–were ranged along the north side, under the shelter of the high north stand. It was about an even thing on these coaches between the blue and the orange. If anything, Yale’s colors were more numerous, but Princeton’s were gaudier, and there you have it.
The Princetonian frequently urged students to remember to book their coaches early, as they usually sold out quickly, both for games played with Yale and elsewhere. Coaches were preferred because they were taller than carriages or wagons, and made it easier to watch the game from their high perches.
It was, after all, Thanksgiving, so food was likely to be on people’s minds (though it seems many Princetonians delayed the big meal by a week). Whether that contributed or not is difficult to determine, but I have found an account of the Yale-Princeton Thanksgiving game from the New York Tribune from November 27, 1891 (“Yale Champion Again”) that is a clear description of something we might call “tailgating” today:
By 10 o’clock the procession of coaches, dog-carts, tally-hoes and other conveyances began to move up Fifth-ave. [sic] and through Central Park. When the van of the line reached Manhattan Field, the unreserved seats already had many occupants. About all the parties in the vehicles brought their luncheons with them, and little parcels of sandwiches helped while away the minutes of waiting in the stands. As each coach rolled on the field it was loudly cheered by the men who wore the colors which the occupants displayed.
The following year, the Nassau Literary Magazine pronounced this parade up 5th Avenue “one of the most enjoyable things in college life,” noting the “bunting covered, luncheoned coaches” as a significant part of the fun.
We don’t know exactly what the lunches contained, but we may have some insights from another writer. Edward James Patterson, Class of 1894, wrote a fictionalized account of someone accidentally getting swept up into such a celebration for the Nassau Lit in 1893. In it, a man who plans to have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner instead takes a ride to see what all the fuss about football is, given that a his son, a student at Princeton, has “hired a coach” and invited the father to watch it go down the avenue. Walking around New York, Mr. Willoughby sees shop windows bedecked with windows with either blue or orange ribbons, and people wearing orange or blue flowers or ribbon rosettes. He then sees two friends his own age in a carriage and accepts their invitation to “take a spin with us!” They offer him cigars, champagne, and turkey sandwiches and convince him to stay with them.
This kind of fun couldn’t stay contained to the Yale-Princeton Thanksgiving game for long. The New York Times reported on a Yale-Harvard game in 1906 in which a reporter observed “small parties of automobilists eating tempting viands that had been brought in hampers spread out in picnic fashion on a table cloth laid upon the ground.” By 1928, picnic lunches were considered a mainstay for football spectators on Princeton’s campus, too, as Princeton Alumni Weekly observed. However, these picnics may or may not have been reliant on vehicles, as many would “carry their food with them and partake of a picnic lunch somewhere or other on University grounds.”
Whether these customs began at Princeton, were inspired by Princeton, or were merely part of the zeitgeist, we at least know that Princetonians of the 19th and early 20th centuries were having some sort of football-related picnics using their vehicles. Necessity likely gave way, at some point, to a feeling of tradition and festivity.
Sources:
America’s Historical Newspapers
New York Times
Presbrey, Frank and James Hugh Moffatt. Athletics at Princeton: A History. New York: Frank Presbrey Company, 1901.
Princeton Alumni Weekly
Princeton University Publications Collection (AC364)
For further reading:
Armstrong, April C. “The Changing Shape of American Football at the College of New Jersey (Princeton).”
__________. “A Princeton Thanksgiving.”
__________. “Princeton’s Thanksgiving Dinners.”
Cialdella, Christa (Cleeton). “The Beginnings of American Football.”
Veri, Maria J. and Rita Liberti. Gridiron Gourmet: Gender and Food at the Football Tailgate. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019.