The Classic Gridiron Marks its Golden Jubilee

Harvard Stadium--the house that built big-time football--celebrates its golden jubilee when the Crimson eleven meets Dartmouth today.

On an autumn afternoon back in 1903, it was Dartmouth that helped dedicate the Stadium--North America's first great college sports arena, and the nation's first reinforced concrete structure. Always the gracious host, the Crimson gave the Big Green an 11-0 victory that afternoon.

A now trend in football got underway the day these teams met in the giant Allston horseshoe. For until 1903, college football games had been, for the most part, informal get-togethers between the sons of well-to-do Eastern families.

But, long-plagued by the seating shortage for games with big opponents like Yale, the College decided to construct the country's first football stadium. As the huge structure, capable of seating nearly 40,000 persons, arose tier by tier across the Charles River, the rest of the football world began to take keen note.

Yale followed her Ivy sister's lead by building the Bowl in 1914, an even vaster, more capacious structure than the Stadium. And then every major college in the lend joined the act. Professionalism in football was on its way: mammoth stadiums rose everywhere, the game itself became a giant.

The Stadium that gave the first push to big-time college football--a game that de-emphasis-minded officials now regard as something of a Frankenstein creation--was opened for the first time on November 14, 1903.

The 20,000-odd spectators who were in the stands for that first game were awestruck. Said the Boston Evening Transcript, it a structure "the like of which is not to be found in this country, and in the Old World, only in a few of the ancient cities of Greece and Italy."

And the Stadium was indeed an engineering masterpiece. The nation's first example of wide-scale reinforced concrete construction, it contained 250,000 cubic feet of concrete and took four-and-one-half months to build. Concrete-steel girders supported some 4,800 concrete slabs, each weighing 1,200 pounds, to form the seats.

One Boston newspaper thought the Stadium looked "sturdy enough to last till Harvard beat Yale in football." It did take the Crimson quite some time to defeat Yale: not until 1913 was the trick accomplished at the Stadium.

Dedication day proved a dismal affair. The heavily-favored Crimson eleven sported a 9-1 record and 18 straight victories over Dartmouth when it trotted onto the Stadium grass for the first time. But the Indians made their debut as a football power by scoring a major 11-0 upset.

It was a convincing Dartmouth victory. The Indians had rushed for 238 yards, the Crimson for only 50. Just once did the Crimson eleven penetrate Indian territorly, and that drive stopped at the 27-yard line.

Overjoyed at the Green's first victory over "fair Harvard," Professor Edwin J. Bartlett, head of the Dartmouth Chemistry Department, celebrated the event in verse:

The Harvard Stadium (1903)

(To be sung to the tune of the Lorelei.)

O here's to fair Harvard's new Stadium,

So Grecian and Roman and tall;

And here's to the Crimson Palladium

That tottered and fell from the wall.

For the lads from the granite mountains

Came down on that classic fold,

And lifted and looted the trophy,

A pigskin more precious than gold.

O here's to the great Colosseum,

So Roman and Grecian and grim;

And here's to the lads came to see 'em,

Whose chances some though pretty slim.

But--Shades of All Strenuous Smashers--

A hundred-ton football machine,

They wrote "Wah-Hoo-Wah" on the Nike,

And painted the pedium green.

We've all seen the great Colosseum,

And stayed in the Stadium too;

We've chortled a hearty "Te Deum"

To christen the battle-ground new.

But we like Johnny Harvard's big boys,

Who stubbornly fought 'gainst their fate;

And so with a great Dartmouth noise,

Their Stad-i-um we celebrate.

For posterity's benefit, another Dartmouth enthusiast gouged the 11-0 score into the still-wet concrete of the colonnade wall.

The Stadium was made possible by two gifts--the first by Major Henry Lee Higginson and the second by the Class of 1879.

Student Playground

In 1890, Higginson--sponsor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Memorial Hall--gave to his alma mater the broad swamps across the Charles that are new occupied by the Business School and the athletic plant, Soldiers' Field.

In a letter written to the Corporation on June 5, 1890, Higginson said: "My hope is that the ground will be used for the present as a playground for the students. . .

"The only other wish on my part is, that the ground should be called 'Soldiers' Field,' and marked with a stone bear the names of some dear friends, alumni of the University, and noble gentlemen who gave freely and eagerly all they had or hoped for to their country and to their followmen in the hour of great need--the War of 1861 to 1865--in defense of the republic: James Savage, Jr., Charles Russell Lowell, Edward Barry Dalton, Stephen George Perkins, James Jackson Lowell, Robert Gould Shaw."

James Russell Lowell selected some of Ralph Waldo Emerson's verse for an epitaph which was carved on the stone immortalizing the six men:

Though love repine and reason chafe,

There comes a voice without reply,

'Tis now perdition to be safe,

When for the truth we ought to die.

In a speech delivered upon the College's acceptance of his gift, Higginson told how the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, used to delight in looking from his window at the beautiful marshes across the River, covered with wooded hills and streams.

Princeton is Not Wicked

Higginson said in his speech: "And just here let me, a layman, say a word to you experts in athletic sports. You come to college to learn things of great value beside your games, which after all are secondary to your studies.

"But in your games there is just one thing you cannot do even to win success. You cannot do one tricky or shabby thing. Translate tricky and shabby--dishonest, ungentlemanlike. (Princeton is not wicked: Yale is not base.)

"Mates, the Princeton and Yale fellows are our brothers. Let us beat them fairly if we can, and believe that they will play the game just as we do."

Soldiers' Feild was put to immediate use and became the scene of Harvard's athletic contests. A battered wooden grandstand was used to accommodate spectators.

But at the turn of the century agitation mounted among Harvard alumni to replace the stands with something more permanent. The Transcript echoed alumni sentiment when it said, in March 1903:

Fire Hazard

"The present grandstands on Soldiers' Field are not alone decidedly ugly, but positively dangerous, and the very sight of a piece of fire apparatus behind the stands at a big football game has made many persons timid."

The danger from the old stands was highlighted early in 1903 when a section of the wooden bleachers at Soldiers' Field caught fire and was demolished during a Harvard-Princeton baseball game. Fortunately, no one was injured.

The Class of 1879 was the moving spirit behind the agitation for a new seating system. Originally, the Class had offered to donate its 25th anniversary gift for the construction of new wooden stands. But Professor Ira N. Hollis, Chairman of the Harvard Athletic Committee, had more ambitions plans--he would build a permanent areus. The Class of 1879 was delighted with the bold ideas.

By 1902 they had subscribed $100,000, the estimated cost for the above-ground structure. Engineers figured the foundations would cost $75,000, and the H.A.A. put up the balance.

In 1902 the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White began drawing up plans for a fireproof building, to be made of steel, brick, and concrete.

Early in 1903, rolls of completed blueprints were rushed up to Boston. Experts in the College's engineering department conducted laboratory experiments through the Spring, and finally decided a cement beam with twisted steel rods running through it would be stronger and cheaper than either stone, brick, or steel. This reinforced concrete was used throughout the structure.

Boston's Aberthaw Construction Company was given the order to begin work, and on Class Day, June 22, 1903, the ground was broken at the site of the structure. Surveys of the field were made that same day.

When all the preliminaries were completed, the construction crew razed the old stands and set up on the spot a complete outdoor foundry for casting cement slabs. A stone crusher, a cement mixer, a narrow-gauge railway running around the field, derrick towers, travelling cranes, and a fully-equipped saw mill were all set up.

The Stadium was completed in time for the Dartmouth game of 1903, and this New-World colosseum had its first full house a week later, when 38,400 people jammed its seats to see the Crimson play Yale.

According to Professor Lewis J. Johnson's article in a 1914 issue of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, "It may be best to draw a veil over the results of those two games." The Crimson didn't win a game in the Stadium during its maiden year. After losing to Dartmouth, it lost, 16-0, to Yale.

But the following year, the Crimson registered five consecutive wins at the Stadium. Not until 1906, however, did it again beat Dartmouth, by a score of 22-9. Both in '04 and in '05, the Big Green had tied the Crimson, 0-0 and 6-6.

Yale trounced her traditional foe four straight times in the Stadium. But in 1911, the Crimson held Yale to a scoreless tie on Stadium ground, and in 1913 finally won, 15-5.

In 1909, the Class of 1879 donated additional money for completion of the Stadium. A covered promenade and towers--which one Boston paper called "the crowning architectural feature of the Stadium"--were added.

By that time the Stadium had cost a total of $345,000. It reached a total length of 585 feet and was 440 feet wide.

In 1908, however, it seemed the Transcript's statement that the Stadium was "sturdy enough to last till Harvard boat Yale" would be proved wrong.

At that time, a Boston newspaper reported the "appearance of dangerous looking cracks at the points of greatest strain in Harvard's expensive Stadium." The newspaper said there existed "the suspicion that the immense structure is deemed to a speedier dissolution than the supporters of the officiency of concrete construction will be willing to admit."

A crew of engineers examined the cracks, found them minor, and buttressed them with concrete. Major repairs on the Stadium were not effected until 1951, when the entire ferro-concrete structure was reinforced.

In 1929, the College made its last major addition to the Stadium. Ever since 1914, when Yale built its enormous Bowl, envious Harvard eyes had been trained on New Haven. When in 1928 track meet drew overflow crowds, University authorities decided it was time to set up additional seating.

Permanent steel stands, accommodating 18,000 and costing $175,000 were decided upon. The College commissioned the firm of Coolidge, Shepley, Bulilnch and Abbott to draw up the plans.

To solve the problem of fire prevention, engineers treated all wood used in the stands with a special fire-resistent chemical. In all, 200,000 board feet of lumber, 650 tons of structural steel, and 200,000 bolts, nuts, and screws went into the making of the additional stands.

But the permanent steel stands proved only temporary. A brief 22 years after it put them up, Harvard decided it no longer needed them. The steel stands were tern down in 1951, once again giving the Stadium its classical horseshoe shape and reducing its seating capacity from 57,000 to 38,000. Sections of the steel stands have reappeared of late in so undignified a locale as the Little League Park in Medfield, behind the first and third base lines