Canton, Ohio, Where the NFL Was Born
Ohio
Canton, Ohio has two claims to national history, and they are very different in character. One is the birthplace of professional football. The other is the adopted hometown of a president who died from an assassin's bullet.
On September seventeenth, nineteen twenty, representatives of about ten professional football teams gathered in the Canton automobile showroom of Ralph Hay, owner of the hometown Bulldogs. They sat on running boards and fenders, there weren't enough chairs, and organized what they called the American Professional Football Association. It would be renamed the National Football League in nineteen twenty-two. The first president of the new league was Jim Thorpe, the great Sac and Fox athlete who had won two Olympic gold medals in nineteen twelve and was then playing for the Canton Bulldogs. The Bulldogs themselves would win the first two NFL championships, in nineteen twenty-two and nineteen twenty-three. Canton holds the league's founding for those reasons, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame has stood here since nineteen sixty-three.
Before football, Canton was known above all for William McKinley. Born in Niles, Ohio, McKinley built his law practice and political career in Canton, serving as prosecuting attorney, congressman, and governor of Ohio before winning the presidency in eighteen ninety-six. He was famous for the front-porch campaign of that year, when he delivered speeches to delegations of supporters who came by rail to Canton from across the country. McKinley won re-election in nineteen hundred but was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in September of nineteen oh one at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, dying eight days later. He is buried in the McKinley National Memorial here, a granite domed mausoleum that remains one of the defining landmarks of the city.
Canon's also a manufacturing city, steel, rubber goods, and precision machinery ran its economy through much of the twentieth century, but it is football and a fallen president that put it on the national map.
