History
The previous home of the Tar Heels had been Emerson Field, which had opened in 1916 on the current site of Davis Library. By 1925, it was obvious that that 2,400-seat facility was not adequate for the increasing crowds. Expansion was quickly ruled out since the baseball team also used it, and any new football seats would have been too far away for baseball.
Funding for the stadium was originally supposed to come from alumni donations. William R. Kenan, Jr., a dairy farmer from Lockport, New York who would later become a prominent businessman in Miami, got word of the initial plans and donated a large gift to build the stadium and an adjoining field house. Kenan was an 1894 UNC graduate and grandson of one of UNC's original trustees. He persuaded UNC to build the stadium as a memorial to his parents, William R. Kenan and Mary Hargrave Kenan.
Ground was broken in November 1926. It was completed in August 1927. At the time, it was located on the far southern portion of campus, but expansions over the years have resulted in the stadium now being near the center of campus.
The stadium officially opened on November 12, 1927. The Tar Heels defeated Davidson College 27-0, with the first touchdown in the new stadium by Edison Foard. The first game at Kenan Stadium brought in 9,000 spectators. The stadium was officially dedicated to the Kenan family on Thanksgiving Day in 1927 in front of 28,000 fans, after the Tar Heels beat the Virginia Cavaliers 14-13.
The original stadium - the lower level of the current stadium's sideline seats - seated 24,000 people. However, temporary bleachers were added to the end zones to accommodate overflow crowds, allowing Kenan to accommodate over 40,000 people at times. This happened fairly often over the years, especially during the Choo Choo Justice era of the late 1940s.
Read more about this topic: Kenan Memorial Stadium
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)