Engineering education in the 1890s at Purdue meant hands-on work in the
forge room, where students heated and molded metal, just like the "blacksmiths"
and "boilermakers" the football team was called after defeating
opponents. Newspaper reporters writing about the success of the football
team inevitably seized on the manual nature of instruction at Purdue.
On Oct. 26, 1891, Purdue football players first were called "Boiler
Makers" in a Crawfordsville newspaper headline (below). Another account
stated, "Those big fellows from Purdue know how to play football as
well as pound the rivets into boilers." No doubt a factor in attaching
a railroad nickname to Purdue was the Schenectady locomotive (above), used
from 1891 to 1897 for research.
The making of the Boilermakers
The traditional story is that the origin of the nickname "Boilermakers"
had to do
with an 1889 football game against Wabash College, an ouchy newspaper reporter
and - maybe - the Monon Shops.
The facts:
Wrong year, right school;
It was a reporter - or rather a headline writer - who coined the term; and
No way were players recruited from the Monon Shops.
Unraveling the legend of the Boilermakers seemed necessary because it is
told so many times in so many ways and - let's face it - it's part of Purdue
lore, and we should get it right.
In short, this is the form the legend most often takes: Purdue traveled
to Crawfordsville in 1889 to play the Wabash College team, prevailed 18
to 4, and the local newspapers proceeded to hurl epithets after the victors,
including the term "boilermakers." The myth is further embellished
by adding that the hulking brutes playing for Purdue were recruited from
the Monon Shops in Lafayette.
The last part of the legend is the easiest, so we'll start there.
Purdue football teams were first called the Boilermakers in 1891. It wasn't
until four years later that the Monon Railroad Shops were relocated from
New Albany to Lafayette.
According to "The Monon Route," a history of the Louisville, New
Albany and Chicago line, the citizens of Lafayette in 1892 approved a tax
levy to help build the shops. They were completed in 1895. So the notion
that sooty employees of the "Shops," as the repair depot was known,
had a hand in the boilermaker mythmaking is impossible.
Next we'll take a look at the newspaper article commonly thought to have
given the world the term
"boilermaker" as a scornful nickname for the Old Gold and Black.
Crawfordsville was served by several daily and weekly papers in 1889, and
all were filled with rants of varying shrillness about the Nov. 23 game.
One article - in the weekly Review - in particular is filled with names
that would make most schoolyard bullies blush.
But despite the fit of pique suffered by the reporter, he doesn't call the
Purdue team "boilermakers." For proof, we consult no less an expert
than Robert Lackey, Class of 1891 and a player on the first football teams
Purdue put on the field.
Writing in the November 1922 Alumnus, Lackey attempts to trace the origin
of "Boilermakers."
For his story, he went to the trouble of typing in the entire Review account
of the Nov. 23, 1889, Wabash-Purdue game.
Although nowhere in the story are the Purdue players called "boilermakers,"
he concludes: "While the word 'Boilermakers' does not appear in this
remarkable document, it started everybody using the terms 'corn huskers,'
'railsplitters,' 'haymakers,' 'log haulers,' 'blacksmiths,' etc., until
these simmered down to the nickname 'Boilermakers,' possibly as a logical
composite of all those expressive terms. In any event, we are proud of the
name and extend our thanks to the writers of the above for the inspiration."
It would be two more years before the Purdue team in truth would be labeled
"boilermakers," again by a protective local press in response
to a defeat of Wabash. The 1891 score was a 44 to 0 drubbing, and the Crawfordsville
reporters and editors tried to make up for the poor showing by the locals.
The headlines in the Oct. 30, 1891, Crawfordsville Star: "A Human Bull
Fight!" Beneath that: "The Wabash Reds Fall in a Big Soup Dish
and are Stirred Up with Spike Nails - One Man Loses an Ear."
In the Daily Journal, the reporter writes of the visiting team: "They
came, they saw, they conquered, and what is more they cut from Mr. Gentry's
ear a piece as large as a slice of roast beef of Old England."
But the greatest laments could be found in the Daily Argus News of Oct.
26: "Slaughter of Innocents," blared the main headline. Beneath
that: "Wabash Snowed Completely Under by the Burly Boiler Makers from
Purdue."
Almost immediately, the Lafayette papers picked up the unique moniker.
In the Lafayette Sunday Times of Nov. 1, in a story about happenings on
campus, we read: "As every one knows, Purdue went down to Wabash last
Saturday and defeated their eleven. The Crawfordsville papers have not yet
gotten over it. The only resource they have is to claim that we beat the
'scientific' men by brute force. Our players are characterized as 'coal
heavers,' 'boiler makers' and 'stevedores.' "
By October of 1892, the name had entered the lexicon of the writers at the
Exponent as they caution the team not to be overconfident after a 4-0 1891
season in which opponents were outscored 192 to 0: "So the 'Boilermakers'
may rest assured that they will meet tactics and men far different from
those so easily overcome last year."
But the question lingers as to how the idea was hatched that the 1889 diatribe
in the Crawfordsville Review gave birth to "boilermakers."
One possible explanation is found in an 1895 Exponent special edition published
just before the Nov. 28 game between Purdue and the University of Illinois.
In a summary of the 1889 season, the writer makes reference to the same
Review story Robert Lackey would refer to many years later:
"They called us 'a great big burly gang of corn-huskers' - 'haymakers'
- 'log-haulers' - 'pumpkin-shuckers,' and Lackey was 'a boiler-maker,' who
went into the Wabash line like a mogul engine, and the more they choked
him the happier he seemed to be."
But what the Review story actually says is: " A blacksmith they had
would come into the Wabash boys like a mogul engine and the more they choked
him the happier he seemed to be."
So ends the unraveling of the legend of the Boilermakers. Now, go tell a
friend.
Stories by Jay Cooperider
Photographs courtesy of Purdue Special Collections
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Success prompted many nasty names
In the first four years Purdue competed in intercollegiate football, the
team amassed a 5-5 record. That represented one game played in 1887, none
in 1888, three in 1889 and six in 1890.
In 1891, Purdue began to enjoy great success. In fact, the Purdue "eleven"
- as teams were called during those early days of football - outscored opponents
192 to 0 in 1891.
This newfound glory was met with something less than admiration from the
competition. And anyone thinking civility is lacking in discourse today
should take a look at the names the Purdue players were called back then.
Purdue in the early 1890s competed in the Indiana Intercollegiate Athletic
Association, made up of DePauw, Butler, Wabash, Earlham, Rose Polytechnic
and Hanover. These foes - and the yearbooks and papers that chronicled their
exploits on the gridiron - left no epithet unhurled. Some examples:
The editors of the Ouiatenon, the Wabash yearbook, in the 1890 edition reflected
on the first-ever game against Purdue. The matchup was played in Crawfordsville
in November 1889, and Purdue prevailed 18 to 4.
"In football she has no rival. Wabash won the state championship in
'86, was robbed of it in '87, and would have had it in '89 had she met true
football players instead of foundry molders."
That year, the Wabash-Purdue winner played Butler for the athletic association
title, and Butler prevailed 14 to 0. But the Butler Collegian editors couldn't
resist pointing out that both football foes that year - DePauw and Purdue
- were guilty of using ungentlemanly language:
"All of which we are led to say by the fact in both of the football
games that Butler played in, her opponents used large quantities of most
picturesque swear words. Especially is this true of the Purdue game, wherein
four of Butler's preachers were opposed to four of Purdue's blacksmiths."
The likeliest explanation for the "preachers" reference is that
Butler was founded in 1855 as Northwestern Christian University and renamed
Butler in 1877.
The Purdue team had a reputation for being roughnecks, both on and off the
field. The Nov. 13, 1891, Bema, the DePauw University student newspaper,
offered this account of an attempted forfeit by the DePauw team manager
in Lafayette, apparently because of excess water on the field:
"The Purdue boiler-pounders also appeared in uniform demanding a game
and scared the little manager to death with their threats, forcing him to
go back to our eleven with the assurance that he had no right to make the
arrangements. Under protest, with little or no hope of doing anything against
the Lafayette amphibians, discouraged and disgusted, our eleven went out
to defeat in an immense mud hole, where football was as impossible as spontaneous
combustion."
During those plainspoken days, newspapers that covered rival teams felt
compelled to take on Purdue in print.
History tells us that of all the names the Purdue eleven were called in
those early days, only "boilermakers" stuck. Here is a list of
names assigned by just the Crawfordsville papers in response to 18 to 4
and 44 to 0 defeats suffered by Wabash in 1889 and 1891:
Corn-huskers
Railsplitters
Haymakers
Log-haulers
Sluggers
Hayseeds
Pumpkin-shuckers
Cornfield sailors
Rolling mill hands
Grangers
Clod mashers and lunch punishers from the wilds of Tippecanoe County
Backwoods farmers
Blacksmiths
And that was just Crawfordsville. Imagine what the team was called in all
the other papers of the day.
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Each campus nickname tells a story
It's a jungle out there - in the world of athletic mascots. Lions, tigers,
leopards, panthers.
Some flee the jungle, choosing the generic bulldog or ranger or hawk.
Purdue athletic teams, though, have scorned the ordinary, opting for the
unique - or at least a little different:
"Boilermakers," West Lafayette Campus. Dating to 1891, the Boilermaker
nickname is unique in college athletics. The history of the name is recounted
elsewhere on this page.
"Mastodons," Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
IPFW chose its mascot in 1969 after bones of the extinct mammal were donated
to the school. About two-thirds of an entire mastodon skeleton was recovered
from a farm near Angola, Ind., and is on display at IPFW. The unique "Don,
the Mastodon" mascot frequents IPFW athletic contests.
"Lakers," Purdue Calumet. Honoring the importance of Lake Michigan
to region residents, Purdue Calumet adopted its Lakers nickname in 1981.
Its logo is a variation of the PUC initials, with the letters forming the
shape of a wave. The Lakers moniker replaced the "Pipers," used
for 15 years previously. It referred to the calumet, a ceremonial pipe smoked
by North American Indians as a token of peace.
"Centaurs," Purdue North Central. Sports teams at the North Central
campus have used the Centaurs nickname since 1968, when the first basketball
team was organized. The half man-half horse was chosen to combine the Purdue
Pete symbol with the students' interest at that time in mythology.
"Metros," Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Its
metropolitan location led IUPUI in 1972 to adopt Metros as its nickname
in its first sports program, men's basketball. The campus uses an alliance
of school colors, IU crimson and Purdue old gold.
Story by Lyn Doyle
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