Rare And Early Lawrence Football Team Photograph / 1881

In 1880, Phillips Andover Academy played Lawrence High School (Massachusetts) in football (abutting towns), one of the earliest accounts of a public High School fielding a football team. This contest was also recognized as one of the first football games played between private and public high schools in the country.

The teams met again in October of 1881 (the Lawrence team pictured), Andover once again coming away with a win. Both the 1880 and 1881 games were played as the American rugby game, both teams switching to the collegiate football game in 1882. Lawrence was playing only a couple of games a year at this time, common for any team in these formative years.

An interesting aspect to this photo is that many of the team’s players wore pillbox caps, quite rare to see in any early football photographs, and one of the main reasons we acquired the photo. Please see our blog entry dated August 9, 2022, for more on the pillbox cap.

A wonderful early and rare football photo. Photo without the mat measures  7 1/2” x 9 5/8”.

Research note: Another photo (not pictured), in the possession of  the Lawrence Public Library (Special Collections) is erroneously identified by them as an 1881 photo of the Lawrence High School football team. It is not labelled or identified as such and they believe that this dating information arose at the time it was donated. As there are several of the same team members in both photos and in the library's photo they are obviously older, we believe their photo to be a year or two later.