Name-a-Day Calendar, June 28: Purdue Boilermakers
Page 234 of 365
Chosen in: 1891
Chosen by: A sportswriter for the Daily Argus
Purdue University was established in 1869 as an industrially focused land-grant school. They began playing football in 1887.
At first their team had no official nickname, but boy, did other schools get mad when Purdue would come into town and beat their teams. Wabash, the liberal arts school, took most offense to getting beat by a land-grant school. They’d call Purdue’s players, among other things, “pumpkin shuckers”, “railsplitters”, “cornhuskers”,1 “log haulers”, “foundry molders”, “coal heavers”, and “stevedores”.2
It was in this fashion that Purdue’s iconic nickname came to be. On October 24, 1891, Purdue waltzed into Crawfordsville and trounced the hometown Wabash boys 44-0. Or perhaps 46-0; sources differ.3 In any case, it was a rout. And Wabash was mad. The title of the game story for Crawfordsville’s local Daily Argus newspaper, written by a sportswriter whose name unfortunately seems to have been lost to time, was “SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS. Wabash Snowed Completely Uunder [sic] by the Burly Boiler Makers from Purdue.”
A boilermaker is exactly what it sounds like. You know what a boiler is, right? In the simplest term, it’s a tank that holds a liquid (most often water) and either heats or completely vaporizes it for use as an energy source. A boilermaker makes boilers. Though Wabash meant it as an insult, boilermaking—like all industrial trades—is a supremely important task that requires a lot of skill.
Not long after the Daily Argus dubbed Purdue’s team “Boiler Makers”, Purdue themselves established a locomotive testing plant, complete with a working train engine. Sensing a theme, the Purdue community rallied around the “Boilermakers” nickname. By 1892, it was pretty much official.
Since 1940, Purdue’s official mascot has been The Boilermaker Special, an automobile built to resemble an old timey locomotive. The car’s seventh iteration, The Boilermaker Special VII, debuted in 2011. (Oh, and I guess there’s also Purdue Pete.)
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P.S. It’s worth noting that there’s an unfounded rumor that the “Boilermakers” nickname may have stemmed from Purdue recruiting football players from local locomotive factories. There were no such local factories from which Purdue could poach their players in the early 1890s.
Imagine
One who loads and unloads cargo. I had to look this one up.
Of the four football games Purdue played in 1891, this was somehow only their third largest margin of victory. The other three games, in chronological order: 30-0 vs. DePauw, 60-0 vs. Indiana (first ever football game between the two schools), and 58-0 at Butler.