Georgia High School Football: Peach State Pigskin History

By Jon Nelson and Dr. Ralph Swearngin

Georgia is known as one of the most competitive proving grounds in America for high school football. The league that began as a few city teams in the late nineteenth century blossomed to the four hundred-plus schools that put teams on the field today. These teams have given college football and the professional ranks their share of champions. As schools across the state continue to chase and break records, a century of winning is only the beginning of Georgia s dynamic high school football legacy. Jon Nelson guides readers through an unparalleled history of coaches, towns and dynasties that have led Georgia to become one of the top five most competitive football states in the country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781625842299

Jon Nelson

Jon Nelson worked as a park ranger in Quetico from 1976 to 1987. He has written numerous articles for ON Nature, Lake Superior Magazine, the Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal, and the Globe and Mail. He lives in Thunder Bay.

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life.

Chapter 1

THE BEGINNING OF IT ALL

IT ALMOST NEVER HAPPENED

The state of Georgia can thank the mother of Vonalbade Von Gammon for having any kind of football. Period.

Von Gammon was a college player for the University of Georgia who died while playing a game against the University of Virginia in 1897. As a result, the Georgia House of Representatives passed a resolution the next day to ban football by a vote of 91 to 3. The three college schools that played the sport at the time—Georgia, Georgia Tech and Mercer—all voluntarily disbanded their squads. The Georgia Senate followed with a vote outlawing football a few weeks later by a 31 to 4 margin. All Georgia governor William Atkinson needed to do was sign the resolutions into law, and football in the state would not exist.

Von Gammon’s mother, Rosalind Burns Gammon, knowing what was transpiring in Atlanta, wrote a letter to her local representative that said in part:

His [Gammon’s] interest in all manly sports, without which he deemed the highest type of manhood impossible, is well known by his classmates and friends, and it would be inexpressibly sad to have the cause he held so dear injured by his sacrifice. Grant me the right to request that my boy’s death should not be used to defeat the most cherished object of his life.

When Governor Atkinson was made aware of the letter and Mrs. Gammon’s feelings on the matter, he didn’t sign the resolution, and the movement to ban football in Georgia ended.

THE ABSOLUTE BEGINNINGS

High schools, as we know them, started their existence in the late nineteenth century. Cedartown High School in northwest Georgia, as an example, dates its start to 1887. Community games took place in some organized settings in south Georgia towns like Thomasville and Valdosta as far back as 1895. But the sport of football started organized play in the early 1900s. Cedartown’s Bulldogs date back to 1903, and other schools dotted around the state share the same timeline. You can even see a restored version of the team photo at Cedartown High School these days—with all eleven players—and the homage the 2003 team gave on the centennial anniversary in its reproductive photograph using current seniors.

Albany High School, Glynn Academy in Brunswick, Waycross High School (which would later turn into Ware County High School), Fitzgerald, Moultrie, Gainesville and Thomasville all started within that first decade in south Georgia, but two Savannah schools have one of the longest-standing rivalries in all of high school football in the United States.

One of the oldest recorded images of what would become high school football in the state of Georgia. Thomasville in 1895. Courtesy TvilleBulldogs.com via Thomas County Museum of History.

The 1903 Cedartown High Bulldogs. The restored picture hangs at Cedartown High School.

The private school (or the Catholics)—Benedictine Military Academy (the last E is silent, by the way)—and the public school (or the Crackers)—Savannah High—started playing in 1903 and have played 109 times since, including playoff games. The Benedictine Cadets lead the series 54-47-8, and the lone win for Benedictine in 2010 was against the Savannah High Blue Jackets for school win number 500. The first game in the series was played at the Bolton Street Athletic Park in front of a reported crowd of eight hundred. From 1920 to 1959, the game was played on Thanksgiving Day at Municipal Stadium to an overflow crowd. The next season, the teams began playing the game before Thanksgiving at the newly constructed Memorial Stadium.

People had the [Thanksgiving Day] parade downtown and the [BC] guys would all march in their military uniforms into the stadium, 1985 graduate and current Benedictine head coach Mark Stroud told the Savannah Morning News’s Noell Barnidge. People dressed up for the game. Everybody had dates. It was pretty cool. It really was. Afterward, the winning team would take a coffin decorated up and they would burn it on Broughton Street. Can you imagine anybody doing that now?

Savannah and Benedictine, the oldest rivalry in the state. Courtesy Maurice Sheppard.

And the rivalry even had its own time on the Savannah city streets. Courtesy Maurice Sheppard.

Sometimes there would even be an effigy of a player inside the coffin, and students and fans from both schools would be present for the burning. The game was the biggest event in Savannah until Georgia high school rule changes resulted in the game being played before Thanksgiving, says Maurice Mutt Sheppard, a 1959 Benedictine grad who wrote a book on the rivalry, Savannah’s Thanksgiving Day Football Classic: Benedictine Vs. Savannah High.

You got involved in that game from the time you were a youngster in grammar school, Albert Whitey Moore, a Savannah High grad, admitted to Georgia Trend Magazine’s Jerry Grillo. Kids around town would ask one another which team you were for and you’d better get the answer right, depending on who was talking.

Whitey Moore would know what the Cadets–Blue Jackets game means to the town. He played for Savannah High, but his three brothers went to Benedictine.

BUT DO WE REALLY WANT A LEAGUE?

The November 4, 1911 edition of the Atlanta Georgian and News newspaper ran an editorial in the Not News, But Views section by Percy H. Whiting that proclaimed an Atlanta Prep League Athletic Association for high school football would be a bad idea. Whiting claimed that one school, Marist, didn’t have a team at the time. Tech High couldn’t field one, either. So that would leave only three schools with a chance at playing a season of football with one another—Boys’ High, Georgia Military Academy and Peacock High. The opinion didn’t stop there:

It has long been known that football isn’t a game that adapts itself to play through a league season. The experiment was made years ago and the failure was suggestive.

The local prep association would do well to leave football leagues alone. If the individual teams want to play, that’s well and good. But it is ridiculous to talk of a series of games for a championship.

We still believe, as we long have, that the Prep league ought to take up soccer football as its Fall game. Certainly it will never do anything with American college football.

So much for listening to Whiting…

THE FIRST STATE TITLES

As a rule, during the years of the North Georgia Interscholastic Athletic Association (1904–19) and the subsequent Georgia Interscholastic Athletic Association (1920–24), titles were claimed more than assigned or won, as they are today, complete with trophies and ceremonies on television. In the city of Atlanta, the Constitution newspaper claimed a champion—much to the chagrin of teams that thought themselves to be the best in any given year. But since the best teams may not have played one another in a fall schedule, the arbitration was indeed arbitrary. Some examples:

From 1907 to 1909 at Gordon High, Bob McWhorter ruled the grass as a halfback for the school. Gordon claimed a title in his senior year after a 60–0 win over Riverside High School.

In Tifton, the Tifton Agricultural and Mechanical School was an active squad in the 1910s. In 1915, the Aggies claimed the South Georgia Championship, beating Valdosta 33–0. A rivalry developed between Tifton A&M and Norman College, and the 1916 Aggies claimed that year’s state title after winning the South Georgia Prep Association’s championship game over Norman, 26–0.

Thomasville High’s Bulldogs started in 1914 and, as was the case with a lot of teams in the era, either scored a lot of points or gave up a lot of points. The Bulldogs’ first game ever was against Ochlocknee, and they put 55 points on the scoreboard in a win, but the next game against Valdosta was one where they gave up 66 in a loss. There would be titles in 1925 and 1927 for Head Coach James K. Harper. The South Georgia Athletic Association recognized the Bulldogs as their champs in two undefeated years.

Valdosta High started in 1914, and can you guess the number of people who showed up for the Wildcats’ debut? Two—one athlete’s parents.

A lot of Georgia schools that were just gaining momentum in the sport called for breaks during 1917 and 1918 due to World War I. Programs like the Fitzgerald Purple Hurricane, which may have played some kind of organized ball before the First World War, actually started their programs in 1919. Colquitt County High School, known as Moultrie High when it started, had played for five seasons before Harold Saxon’s team went 7-0 and was named the South Georgia Champs. They would add another south Georgia title in 1928 under Dode Phillips in a season that included a scoreless tie against legendary Boys’ High.

LaGrange High in western Georgia played a handful of games (as the records indicate) from its beginning in 1908 through the 1918 season—winning only three times, losing eleven and tying one. Bernie Moore would coach the team from 1918 to 1920 before he moved on to LSU and a tour as commissioner of the SEC. But the mid-1920s gave the then–LaGrange Veterans four claimed state titles under T.W. (Tatum) Gressette. LaGrange won thirty-one straight at one point and has titles from 1924 to 1926. They even organized a state championship game against Moultrie High on Thanksgiving Day 1926 to put all claims to rest that year.

The Lincoln County/Lincolnton High program started in 1922, and another rivalry began with its western neighbors in Wilkes County.W.T. Dunaway would take his first team to a 6-2-1 record—his first of five winning seasons in the school’s first six years of play. But playing Washington High twice in 1922 only gave the then-Bearcats a 7–7 tie and a 13–6 loss against the neighboring Bearcats. Robert Skeet Willingham has written a book on what is now called Washington–Wilkes Tigers football and referred to game two in the series this way: Though holding things in order on the field, the activities of the spectators could not be controlled and, because of unruly fan behavior, the two teams would not re-institute playing each other until 1939.

There had almost been another year in between during which the two played—1925. Wilkes County had won the East Georgia Championship, and Lincoln County wanted its piece of a championship in what would be called a plus one game in the present day after an 8-0-1 season. Wilkes declined the offer, and naturally, Lincolnton declared themselves to be the champions. The champions of exactly what, no one can actually figure out.

THE NEXT STEP

In 1920, the Georgia Interscholastic Athletic Association (GIAA) was formed at the encouragement of Atlanta Boys’ High principal W.O. Cheney. The member schools—Boys’, Atlanta Tech, Lanier, Monroe A&M, Gordon, Georgia Military College (Milledgeville) and Riverside—tried to take care of a larger issue other than naming a champion. Since player eligibility was somewhat shady in some instances in the past, these schools wanted to try to have a way to make sure paperwork was available on each participating athlete, or if there was no proof, any athlete under the age of twenty had to sit out a year if he was transferring from one member school to another.

But the 1922 GMC squad had other ideas. After they lost a player to a car accident, Atlanta Constitution scribe Craddock Goins saw something he didn’t like. According to the Georgia High School Football Historians Association, Goins wrote:

The Milledgeville institution is not interested in the GIAA, but out to give its students all the football amusement they want and to try to turn out winning teams…it is high time the schools of the state get together and see just how each one stands on the matter of athletic control. If the GIAA, then they should observe its rules, for Georgia wants to call some team champion.

Another unique idea the GIAA brought about after the GMC incident was the implementation of an impartial arbiter to determine eligibility of athletes and just who the champions would be at the end of the year. The arbiter also was responsible for the first North-South title game starting in 1925. But that wouldn’t be the end of it by any means…

SMITHIES AND PURPLE HURRICANES

As the only two high schools inside the city of Atlanta, Tech High and Boys’ High garnered a majority of the attention in the time of the GIAA. The two schools combined for thirteen titles from 1923 to 1945 and were the pipelines for most of the talent