Name-a-Day Calendar, May 21: North Carolina Tar Heels

Page 196 of 365

Chosen in: 1888

Chosen by: It happened naturally

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I’m gonna speed through this one as quickly as possible because, while this is one of my alma maters, quite a few people have already written about the origin of the “Tar Heels” nickname much better and more thoroughly than I ever could, so I feel it’s more prudent to link some of their work.

The basic story is this: not long after Europeans settled in North America, they realized that what is now the southeastern United States contained a seemingly endless coniferous forest. In this era, the use of liquid byproducts from conifer trees was the primary method of waterproofing naval ships. These byproducts—namely tar, turpentine, and pitch—are known as naval stores and quickly became the largest industry in much of the southeast, including and especially the land that is now North Carolina.

Producing naval stores was, of course, a blue collar job, so elites often looked down upon laborers in this field. Calling North Carolina the “Tar and Turpentine State” and its residents “Tar Boilers” or, yes, “Tar Heels” was originally a classist insult.

This continued until the American Civil War, when North Carolina’s soldiers more or less reclaimed the epithet for themselves. How and when exactly this happened is up for debate. There are a bunch of stories about it, some of which are probably untrue; again, I’ll just link a more in-depth piece at the end of this one and let you read them for yourselves. It is also worth noting that North Carolina fought for the Confederacy, so you can make a convincing argument that this whole thing is racist.

In any case, this reclamation continued in the Reconstruction Era: North Carolinians became even more proud to call themselves Tar Heels. In 1888, when the University of North Carolina—already nearly a century old on account of being the oldest public university in the United States—founded their football team, the nickname came naturally.

As for why the mascot is a ram, that came almost 40 years later. In 1924, through the first week of November, the Tar Heels football team had struggled to a 2-4 record and was failing to drum up much fan interest. Cheerleader Vic Huggins believed the problem was that, unlike many of Carolina’s nearby rivals, the Tar Heels didn’t have a mascot, so he took it upon himself to procure one.

The star player on the 1924 Tar Heels was fullback Jack “Battering Ram” Merritt. Playing on Merritt’s nickname, Huggins thought a ram would be a fitting mascot. The university agreed and gave him $25¹ to purchase a live ram from Texas. Rameses, as Huggins named him, debuted at the November 8, 1924, football game against VMI, which the Tar Heels won 3-0. The rest is history; the line of live ram mascots—all of whom have been named Rameses—continues to this day and is now 21 rams deep.

A costumed ram would also be introduced in 1987, undergoing a few aesthetic remodels before landing on its current look.

Anyway, I promised a more in-depth piece detailing the history of the “Tar Heels” nickname during the Civil War: here you go.

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