The Early Years

The Early Years

Carson Field in Burnet Woods

1800 - 1920

It was a farm, at first.

A Scottish family was the first people of record to tame the land up the hill from Cincinnati in the early decades of the 1800s. In a 1901 Enquirer article published just after his death, Archibald Johnston recalled planting corn on his uncle’s farm before the family moved to Blue Ash in 1839. 

The Shoemaker family later owned the land before the Burnets and the Groesbecks bought it. In 1874, Robert Burnet and William Groesbeck sold it to the city of Cincinnati for use as a park––named Burnet Woods in honor of Robert’s father Jacob, the first president of Cincinnati College, which would later become UC. 

In 1889, the land found a third life when Jacob Donelson Cox, UC’s president, negotiated with the city to acquire the southernmost 43 acres to serve as the new campus for his rapidly growing university.

And then, in 1901, the land evolved once more when that university’s young football team, with the help of a donation from the mayor of Cincinnati, went to work preparing its first on-campus playing field and dug up an old farmhouse.

The foundation of an old house was struck by the plow of the workmen excavating the athletic field on the grounds of the university in Burnet Woods yesterday, and the discovery created quite a lot of talk among the old inhabitants of that locality. None of the oldest can remember anything of a house ever having been at the place, and they were all puzzled to know how old the house was and who lived in it. The foundation is of brick and stone, and is covered by about five inches of light loam. It is partly beneath a big sycamore tree, which evidently stood in front of the house originally. It is located at the west end of the athletic field, and was a good-sized house, and was probably occupied by some well-to-do farmer over 75 years ago. Burnet Woods has been in the possession of the city for about 30 years, and before that it was private property. It belonged to the estate of Jacob Burnet and the Groesbeck prior to that. Old residents say there used to be a house on top of the hill facing Clifton Avenue, but none of them know of a house that stood in the bottoms where the foundation was discovered.
Cincinnati Enquirer
August 18, 1901

 

Cincinnati athletic director Dr. Arch Carson founded Cincinnati football in 1885. The team played its early home games off campus, in venues like the Reds’ League Park—the future site of Crosley Field. By 1895, Carson realized the program needed a venue at its home in Clifton. Carson hatched a plan to construct a playing field in UC’s Burnet Woods home, and the university chose the location based on feedback from students who had held the traditional Flag Rush in a lagoon at the heart of campus. The sunken, marshy plot of land was filled in with soil from other campus construction projects and served as a perfect place for an athletic field because of the way the surrounding hills served as natural walls.

Estimated stadium costs came in at $4,650. Despite a $2,000 donation from Cincinnati Mayor Julius Fleischmann, the fundraising efforts took five years to complete. Work began with wooden bleachers on the sideline hills in 1901, and Cincinnati football played its first game in Clifton that year.

In 1910, the university officially named the field “Carson Field” in honor of the father of Cincinnati football. It was then that UC began planning for a permanent, concrete stadium. Original plans called for the seats to be installed in an oval, but that plan was abandoned due to other oval-shaped stadiums struggling with air circulation. Surely, Carson Field, set deep into the ground, would fare poorly. They went with a horseshoe.

Construction on permanent structures began in 1915. In 1916, the first nine sections of the stadium were financed by a city bond. In 1920, two more sections were added with war reclamation funds. In 1921, another three sections were added thanks to student subscriptions—a story in its own right. It was then, according to The Cincinnatian, that the well had dried up. The stadium stood incomplete, and there was no feasible way to find the money to finish it.