October 24, 1914: Palmer Stadium opens, on the southern edge of the campus of Princeton University in Princeton, Mercer County, New Jersey. Princeton defeats Dartmouth College, 16-12.
Prior to Palmer Stadium, Princeton played at University Field, also known as Osborne Field, about 3 blocks to the north of the Palmer site. It seated 20,000, and they continued to play baseball at the site until 1960, when the Engineering Quadrangle began to be built on the site.
The building was named for Stephen S. Palmer, a trustee of the university, by his son, Edgar Palmer III. It was a horseshoe with the open end at the south, facing Lake Carnegie, with a full-sized track around the football field. (In 1936, Edgar Palmer III also funded the building of the centerpiece of the Borough of Princeton, Palmer Square.)
While playing at Palmer Stadium, Princeton won 5 National Championships: 1920, 1922, 1933, 1935 and 1950. The Ivy League was founded in 1954, and in 2021, Princeton won its 12th Ivy League title.
Briefly, in the early 1970s, when the New York Giants needed a temporary home between the October 1973 closing of the original Yankee Stadium and the October 1976 opening of Giants Stadium. Palmer Stadium was considered, due to its relative proximity and its 45,750-seat capacity -- larger than Michie Stadium at West Point, and twice the capacity of Rutgers Stadium.
Traffic and parking would have been a nightmare, but the real reason it was voted down was that the NFL now had a rule that games had to be played in stadiums of at least 50,000 capacity. That rule was bent for the Tennessee Oilers (1998) and the Los Angeles Chargers (2017-19), but not for the Giants in the 1970s.
On October 10, 1987, I was at Palmer Stadium to see Princeton play Columbia. Dean Cain, later to play Superman on television, intercepted a pass and returned it for a touchdown, and Princeton won, 38-8. It was Columbia's 35th consecutive loss, setting a new record for the longest in NCAA Division I history. Oddly, the next season, they ended that streak by beating Princeton at home, at 44 games. Prairie View A&M put that record out of reach, losing 80 straight from 1989 to 1998.
with Jadwin Gym in the background
By the time of that 1987 Princeton-Columbia game Palmer Stadium was already in bad shape. It remained the Princeton Tigers' home until 1996, when, finally bowing to the reality that age had rendered it unsafe, the University agreed to tear it down and build a new home field on the site.
As with the 1st game, the last game was against Dartmouth, on November 23, 1996, and Princeton lost, 24-0. (To be fair, Dartmouth was then ranked Number 18 in the nation, and finished the season undefeated.) Only 16,461 fans came out to say goodbye. The days of Princeton football really mattering were long gone.
Princeton played all their 1997 games on the road while Powers Field at Princeton University Stadium was built on the site. Amazingly, they went 6-4. They did play 2 games in New Jersey. They beat Fordham before 4,050 fans at Lions Field in Ewing, home of the school formerly known as Trenton State College, but which, in 1996, had just taken on the name that Princeton University, itself, had until 1896: "The College of New Jersey." And they beat Yale at Giants Stadium (roughly halfway between the schools), in front of 7,731.
Don't be shocked by those low attendances: Ivy League football is no longer a big draw, and when their game against Penn at Franklin Field got 15,847, it became Princeton's only game all season with more than 8,542. (Penn didn't do much better: With a poor season, it was their only crowd above 13,000 at the 60,000-seat stadium.)
What is usually called simply "Princeton Stadium," with a capacity of 27,773 seats, opened on September 19, 1998. Princeton beat Cornell University, 6-0, before a full house. They had 4 more home games, each with at least 19,000 fans.
Jadwin Gym had opened in front of Palmer Stadium's open south end in 1969. Weaver Track & Field Stadium was built in between Princeton Stadium and Jadwin Gym, giving Princeton a top-class track facility and enabling them to build the stands at their new football stadium close to the field, without a track around it.
In 2007, in honor of a $10 million donation for a new artificial turf field the year before, by William C. Powers, managing director at Pacific Investment Management, and a former Princeton defensive back and punter, the playing surface was renamed Powers Field. The stadium retained the name Princeton Stadium.
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October 24, 1914 was a Saturday. These other notable college football games were played that day:
* Army beat Holy Cross, 14-0 on The Plain in West Point, New York. Army went 9-0 that season.
* Navy beat Western Reserve, 48-0 at Worden Field in Annapolis, Maryland.
* The University of Chicago beat Purdue, 21-0 at Stagg Field in Chicago.
* Nebraska beat Michigan State, 24-0 at Nebraska Field in Lincoln. Nebraska finished 7-0-1 and won the Missouri Valley Conference title.
* Tennessee beat Alabama, 17-7 at Waite Field in Knoxville, Tennessee. They went 9-0, and won the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association title.
* Illinois beat Northwestern, 33-0 at Northwestern Field in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois. At the time, Northwestern considered Illinois their arch-rivals, but Illinois considered theirs to be Chicago. Illinois went 7-0, and won the title of the Western Conference, which later became the Big Ten.
* Texas beat arch-rival Oklahoma, 32-7 at Fair Park Stadium in Dallas. Texas went 8-0 that season, and won the 1st-ever Southwest Conference title.
* In what would become a major rivalry, Minnesota beat Iowa, 7-0 at Iowa Field in Iowa City.
* Syracuse beat Michigan, 20-6 at Archbold Stadium in Syracuse, New York.
* Penn State stunned Harvard, playing them to a 13-13 tie at Harvard Stadium in Boston.
* Notre Dame, coming off its major upset of Army the season before, beat South Dakota, 33-0 at Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
* In New York City, the Polo Grounds hosted a neutral-site game in which Cornell beat Brown, 28-7; Fordham beat Rhode Island State (known since 1951 at the University of Rhode Island), 28-0 at Fordham Field in The Bronx; and New York University beat Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: NYU 17, RPI 6, at Ohio Field in The Bronx.
* And New Jersey's other school -- it would be a long time before they could turn Princeton into the Garden State's "other school" -- Rutgers beat Tufts, 16-7 at Neilson Field in New Brunswick.
The baseball season had ended the day before, with the Boston Braves completing a "miracle" 4-game sweep of the Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series. Professional basketball barely existed. It was too early for hockey season to start.
In English soccer, North London team Arsenal went to the East Midlands, and lost to Derby County, 4-0 at The Baseball Ground. Derbyshire was one of the few places in England where baseball caught on, and it wasn't for long, yet the "Baseball Ground" name held until the stadium was replaced in 1997.
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