Blount Library Blog

Treasures from the Averett Archives: A College Football Flier from 1899

Although Averett's football program didn't take shape until the year 2000 - and the school wasn't even officially co-ed until the late 1960s - through an odd set of coincidences the Averett Archives holds a football memento dating all the way back to 1899 which is technically Averett-related.

Although football was still in a relatively early state of development in 1899, other colleges in the region were among the sport's early adopters.  Richmond College (now the University of Richmond) took up the game in 1881.  Hampden-Sydney began play about a decade later, with the earliest recorded game taking place in 1892.

This small flier (4 1/2 x 6 3/4 inches) was either handed out or posted in the Richmond area to announce a home football game, at Broad Street Park, on October 28, 1899 (a date we can only confirm because the flier's owner wrote in the score).  By chance, one of the players for the Richmond Spiders in this game was center J.W. Cammack who, 28 years later, would become the President of Averett College - a position he would hold for about a decade.  Reporting on the game, the Richmond Dispatch described it as a "hotly-contested" and well supported game, with a crowd of rooters for both sides adding up to a total of around 500 spectators.  Included in this report was a drawing of Cammack, then in his early 20s, although nothing regarding his play was mentioned in the article itself.

The flier's journey into the Averett Archives was long and winding - and utterly accidental.  It was kept by someone in the Phifer family (Robert S. Phifer was a music teacher at Averett from the late 1870s to the mid 1890s).  Although it is unclear who kept the flier and why, it was donated to the Averett Archives more than a century later, as a stray bit of ephemera included by chance in the Phifer Family Papers.  The flier's relationship to Cammack, and thus to Averett, had been entirely forgotten until the University Archivist did research on the item today: November 11, 2024.

The Richmond Spiders team photo.  Cammack is second from the left in the top row.  (From University of Richmond Archives.)