By George Edmonston Jr.

For 110 years now, the start-up date for OSU football has been Nov. 11, 1893.

Photo of the 1893-1894 OSU Football team from the Orange & Black.

At 2 p.m that historic day, on a makeshift field located between 9th and 11th streets on what is known as Oregon State's "lower campus," a team of 17 players, quarterbacked and coached by Will Bloss, the son of the school's president, smashed a team from nearby Albany College, 62-0, to launch one of OSU's most important and enduring athletic traditions.

In OSU's 2003 Football Media Guide and in countless newspaper articles and other publications produced for over a century, the game and the year have become carved in granite, an icon of sorts not to be tampered with or questioned.

However, in the last several weeks, thanks to a recent discovery by OSU alumna Mary Gallagher (M.A.I.S. '83), this hardened stone may be showing a bit of a crack.

Rummaging through the John E. Smith Collection at the research library of the Benton County Historical Museum in Philomath, where she serves as the museum's collection's manager, Gallagher stumbled across a four-page "diary" or manuscript which seems to confirm something Beaver football historians have long suspected: OSU's first collegiate season may have been played in 1893, but the sport itself had been introduced to campus much earlier.

A photo copy of a page from the Starr manuscript.

Written by John H. Starr, an Oregon Agricultural College graduate in the class of 1891, the pencil-scribbled manuscript recalls a story about football's arrival to Corvallis, and dates the event from the last year in which the college was housed at its original downtown location.

This would have been either the fall of 1888 or the spring of 1889 (Starr doesn't say), since the school did not change locations until the fall of 1889, that is, until OAC's first building on the new campus, known since 1947 as Benton Hall, was ready for occupancy.

Wrote Starr:

"It was the last year for OAC in the old wooden building, located in the heart of the city of Corvallis, when someone heard of a game called 'football.'

"Immediately, the urge was on--OAC must be up with the times--a football should be obtained at once.

"So the boys began to dig--a quarter here, 35 cents there, until enough had been collected with which to purchase the coveted pigskin. The order was sent on to Chicago--S&R (note: probably Sears and Roebuck) lost no time in seeing that we had a football. It arrived, and on the next Friday afternoon 'practice'was held but not for so long as had been anticipated.

"George Skeels (not an OAC student) and Applewhite (probably John C. Applewhite of the class of 1889), selected as centers, approached the oval, as it stood on end in the center of the field (the one getting in first kick getting advantage of the play) but these kicks ended in a tie. The ball flew upward six feet then dropped to earth, deflated. Then it dawned on us we had forgotten to ask questions as to the method of caring for such a toy. Knowledge came slowly. We had no way to remedy a busted bladder. Never had it occurred to us that we should have purchased an extra 'filler,'so dreams of an OAC football team vanished for that season.

Mary Gallagher is photographed holding a page of the Starr manuscript. Photo by Dennis Wolverton.

"Then our school was moved out on "the hill" but provision for an athletic field had not been made, so the game did not get under headway until a year or so later."

Starr, who seems to have not only been an eyewitness to the above event but was also a participant, also confirms with his statement "a year or so later" a rather curious comment that appeared in an April 29, 1892, issue of the Corvallis Gazette newspaper, which reported: "Football was all the rage for awhile but as soon as the boys found out there is considerable hard work mixed in with it...they have decided to leave it alone...and play base ball."

If Starr, Skeels, and Applewhite were among the first to transport the pigskin sport to Corvallis and OAC, they were not the first to introduce it to Oregon.

That distinction probably belongs to Portland's Bishop Scott Academy, which may have played the rough-and-tumble sport as early as 1886 and which subsequently inspired the city's Multnomah Athletic Club in 1887 to form a team.

Using these earliest examples as a guide, it is not beyond the realm of possibility to suggest that football came to Corvallis by way of the City of Roses with a beginning date of somewhere between the fall of 1888 or early 1889.

Nowhere in the manuscript does Starr indicate when he may have written his football story. But according to David Brauner, an OSU professor of archeology who has read the manuscript, and who has spent his entire academic career using diaries to date his diggings, Starr shares enough detail in his story--including names, locations and events--to warrant serious consideration.

"There's nothing I see in his story that puts up a red flag," Brauner says. "It's a first-person account that seems to indicate he knows what he's talking about."

Gallagher still delights in telling at how she discovered Starr's manuscript:

"With the recent controversy over the naming of Corvallis' new middle school after J. C. Avery, I was going through a lot of our museum records doing research on Avery's contributions to the community. One of the places I always look for local history is in the John E. Smith Collection.

"Because the collection is still in the condition in which it was donated to us, not thoroughly cataloged, it's pretty much a process of going through it paper-by-paper. In doing so, I came across this little manuscript and I looked through it very quickly to see if it contained anything about Avery."

"I immediately realized what it was," she adds. " The minute I read about them purchasing the first football and that they were still at the old building on 5th Street, this caught my attention right away and made me want to read on."

Smith, himself an Oregon Stater from the class of 1902, was, during his lifetime, a veritable walking archives of Benton County history.

His research and writings quickly gained for him the knowledge and peer respect he needed to become a founding member in 1951 of the Benton County Historical Society, which owns and operates the museum.

Housed in downtown Philomath in what was once Philomath College, the Benton County Historical Museum is considered by many to be a local treasure and a must-see for residents and visitors alike.

Smith's collection contains thousands of items, many of which are his handwritten notes, penciled on even the smallest scraps of paper, and containing historical information a researcher can find nowhere else.

Born and raised in McCoy, Ore., in Polk County, Smith left the Northwest to earn a master's degree in geology from Iowa State in 1911, after which he served on the faculties at Kansas State, the University of Missouri and the University of North Carolina, before closing out his career in the 1930s back at Iowa State.

Retiring in 1937, Smith moved back to Corvallis and taught at Oregon State College during the post-war years. He passed away after a long illness on Dec. 14, 1963.

Knowing a good thing when he saw it, Smith had the good sense to preserve for present and future Beaver gridiron enthusiasts what may be the Holy Grail of OSU football collectibles, an eyewitness account of OSU's marquee sport at the break of its dawn.

George Edmonston Jr. is editor of the Oregon Stater and Eclips.