If football, soccer, has an American heartland it is New Jersey, particularly the towns that grew up on either side of the Passaic River just as it flows past Newark and reaches the sea. True in 1880 an idea had been floated to have a Scottish representative team travel to the USA. William Somers, the ex. Queen's Park and the previous year a Scotland player, was suggested as a captain of one of the American teams to be played and he had settled in New Jersey. However, that was Jersey City, across the water from New York and it was five miles to the east that Clarks', the Paisley-based makers of cotton thread, made the centre of their American operations. In 1865 their first mill had been built in Newark itself with workers, initially mainly women, brought from Scotland to start production. However, by 1875 the original premises had been outgrown and a move was made across the river to two new mills in East Newark with more Scots brought to install machinery and teach the new techniques they required and it seems likely to have been then and there that football, the new game, might have first arrived, in its Scots working-class form at least, in the USA.
Two more Clark's mills followed in 1890 on the same site, with at their peak 3,000 people employed, including many more immigrants, many more Scots with their love of the round-ball game by then deeply ingrained. And the thread-spinners had in the meantime been joined locally in 1883 by the Scots-Irish flax spinners, the Linen Thread Co., the contagion of football had also spread to Paterson, another textile town to the north of New Jersey and known as Silk City, and in 1887 there was still more Scots input to the already formalising local game. Michael Nairn, of what has become Forbo Nairn of Kirkcaldy, opened the American Nairn Linoleum Company leading to further expansion of the neighbouring towns to East Newark of Harrison,
Kearny, which might be better called Scotstoun USA, and West Hudson.
Formalisation of the game locally had first appeared in 1883 with a meeting of 150 Clarks' employees. A team was formed not just with official sanction but open, company participation. Campbell Clark and William Clark Jnr. were elected its first president and vice-president respectively. William Clark, perhaps more than anyone deserving of the title, Father of US Soccer, although the boss, was active not just off but on the pitch. He and it played at the company’s Clark Field in the factories’ grounds and the team itself was called Clark ONT. The name had a commercial purpose. The initials were an advertising slogan for the company's premium product, ‘Our New Thread’.
It was also in precisely the same period in
Fall River, in southern Massachusetts and another spinning town, that there was also a substantial influx of immigrants from Glasgow and Lancashire. They too would form football clubs in their new home. Fall River Rovers was founded in 1884, joined by the end of the decade by Olympics and East Ends. And they were formations also mirrored in nearby
Pawtucket
in Rhode Island, where J. P. Coats, Paisley's other thread-makers, set up its US operations, leading to the foundation of the Free Wanderers and Pawtucket Olympics.
Back in New Jersey the example of Clarks ONT was soon replicated and in little more than a year there were enough clubs within a fifteen mile radius to warrant an umbrella organisation. The American Football Association was formed, marking the transition of soccer from past-time to American sport. It would in time consist of thirteen clubs, eight of them from New Jersey, two from New York, two from Fall River and one from Connecticut but started with six, five from New Jersey, the initial cradle of the game, and one from New York.
The creation of the American Cup in 1885 was one of the first acts of the American Football Association. It allied itself to the Football Association in England yet did not try to organise a league but through the cup sought to standardise the rules used, at first in New Jersey and New York, then extending its remit within two years to Rhode Island and Southern New England then later and perhaps most importantly in the longer term to Pennsylvania.
After a first victory against New York in 1885, Clark ONT was to be American Cup-winners for two subsequent years, in both of which immediate New Jersey neighbours, Kearny Rangers, were runners-up. We know the names of many of the players. In the very first game William Clark was ONT captain in a 2-0 win. He was joined for that game and through the season by,
Douglas, Kenworthy, Sargent, the Swithemby, actually Swithenby brothers, Howarth, Smith, J. Spillane, Mitchell, McGurk, Hughes, Holden, Donnelly, Garron, Thornton and Swarbrick.
The Scots influence in that first season was strong but nothing like that on New York and Kearny Rangers with players drawn from other factories. New York's eleven was,
Walker, Johnston, Marsterton, Sinclair, Gold, Mitchell, Young, Lowe, Grant, Sinclair and McNeil. Kearny included Ferguson, Hood, Morris, a second Hood, Lennox, R. Raeburn, Hill, Bolton, Ashley, Taylor and Milner
with Mitchell and Lennox respective captains.
1885 would also see the first, if unofficial, international. Canada, in the form of Ontario's Western Football Association, captained by Scots-born
David Forsyth, came to visit and beat an American Football Association eleven 0-1. It was a rough game played to American rules at Clark Field. In fact we know both the teams and both lined up not in The Pyramid but 2:2:2:4 , Scottish-style at the time before
The Cross. In goal for Canada was,
McKendrick with Bowman, Brubacher, Fraser, Malcolm, Palmer, Lamport, Thomson, Gibson and a second Gibson and Forsyth
the centre-forwards. The USA was,
Hughes, Holden and Lennox, Hood and Swithenby, Turner, McGurck, Young, a second Swithenby, a second Turner and Lucas.
One of the two umpires was none other than William Clark and the referee, ONT's other goalkeeper, John Douglas. There were perhaps thirteen Scots, first or second generation, on the field that day and at least one more on the sidelines.
Then, with the introduction of New England teams, the mantle of champion was passed in 1888 first to Fall River for five years, and then to Pawtucket for two. It was only in 1895, 1896 and 1898 that Newark Caledonian, Paterson True Blues and Kearny Arlington were to reassert the supremacy of New Jersey, a sequence before the competition ceased in 1898 only interrupted by Philadelphia Manz, one of number of teams beginning to be formed in similarly industrialising Pennsylvania.
By the middle of the 1890s, mimicking, to an extent, developments in Britain with the formation in 1888 of the Football League and in 1890 its Scottish equivalent, leagues also began to emerge. The semi-professional National Association Football League (NAFBL) was started in 1895 with games to be played in the summer months. Initially it consisted of seven teams, Americus, International A.C., Newark Caledonians, New York Thistle, Kearny Scots, Brooklyn Wanderers and Centreville A.C., several with obvious Scottish connections and all drawn from New Jersey and New York. No team from New England took part. It was won in its first season by Centreville from Bayonne in south New Jersey with Kearny Scots as runners-up.
Americus was only to play one season and the league was to switch from summer to winter matches with a mid-winter break and Kearny Scots, now called the Kearny Scottish-Americans, this time topping the table. However, the example encouraged the interest of others. In 1897, in spite of International A.C., Newark Caledonians and New York Thistle dropping out, two Paterson clubs, Crescent, for a season, and True Blues joined, as did Kearny AC, again for a season, and Kearny Arlington for two. Newcomers, the True Blues, would take the championships for the next two years, in spite in 1898 of two further clubs, Bayonne Bayside and Kearny Cedars, being added.
However, America was entering a period of economic depression, which coincided with the Spanish-American War. Football suffered. In 1899, a year after the American Cup, the NAFBL was also suspended. That is not to say football ceased. There would still be some show of life. In 1900 New Jersey's Kearny Scottish-Americans played Rhode Island's Pawtucket North Ends in what was deemed The Association Football Championship. It was a largely Scottish affair. The origins of the Kearny team remain obvious. However, Pawtucket's local football had also been sustained by the creation in 1898 of its Football Association club by a committee of committed enthusiasts, Alex Meiklejohn, Archie Adam, Peter Lyon and Alex Jeffery with the captain given as Reid, probably James Stark Reid, all Scotland-born, Meiklejohn in Denny, Adam in Paisley, Jeffery in Kilburnie and Lyon and Reid in Glasgow. They, and the local games that resulted, created the base in 1900 for the formation of the Coats company team, Pawtucket Rangers, in 1900 and the creation of its field just beside the local Conant mill Coats had formally acquired in 1893, the same year it had amalgamated with Clarks.
And its and the town's rivalry with Fall River, twenty miles away across the state line, was similarly continued. The following year too in an all-New Jersey encounter Kearny Arlington defeated Newark Scots 2-1 for what was called The American Cup. However, neither the Cup or the league would re-emerge in a sustained form until the new century when there was also something of a fresh and more expansive start.