Pawtucket
If there is a soccer town in America that blows no trumpets then it is Rhode Island's Pawtucket. Yet, indeed perhaps because of this, it is the place where top-flight soccer in the USA for the last twenty years of the 19th Century and much of the first half of 20th Century proved most resilient. It might even be said that it saved the game, giving it a 20th Century future.
The story of Pawtucket football began, like
Kearny and
Fall River, with cotton, -thread and -cloth. In the mid 1880s the town had a population of about 23,000, of whom 1,800, half the manufacturing labour, were employed at one location. It was named after its founder, Hezekiah Conant, American-born, and arriving in 1868. But the crucial date was 1869, which was when he, after a visit to Scotland to tie up with Paisley's J & P Coats to produce their threads, he began to build Conant Mill with production beginning the following year.
But that was not enough in itself to bring football to the town. After all the game was then just six years old and had hardly reached Scotland never mind had infected Paisley. The crucial moment came some fifteen years later in the mid-1880s when the Conant's capacity was expanded, new, skilled labour was required and it came, as at Fall River, from Lancashire and also from Scotland and Ireland, where by then football had taken hold, indeed in Scotland become a passion.
With the arrival of new blood carrying the football contagion games must have started almost immediately and clubs soon followed, of which the most successful was Pawtucket Free Wanderers. By 1886 it is said to have been the local champions and we have the team not for that year precisely but 1888 or 1889. It is exactly what would be expected. The players are a blend of English, Irish and Scots. The manager is Scots or Northern Irish and the President is John Denton, who was an agent for the Pawtucket Yarn Mill and himself quite likely also Scots.
By then Pawtucket Free Wanderers had also entered the American Cup. It first takes part in 1888 and continues to do so at least until 1895 when it was runner-up, having in 1893 taken the trophy outright, just as Hezekiah Conant retired and Coats bought him out and started its own programme of investment and some recruitment. In the meantime the town had also seen the arrival of a Scottish international, James Johnston of Abercorn, who would continue to play locally. The American Cup itself was played for until 1898, from when there was a seven year hiatus. However, it seems likely in Pawtucket a wave of labour problems in the textile industry caused the game to be disrupted earlier, in 1896 and 1897, not least because, on the basis of "why try to fix what is not broken", already in 1898 a major effort was made to revive it.
On the face of it the 1898 revival effort appeared local but, as it turns out, now seems to have been much more important than first apparent. It might even be argued that it was a turning-point not just for football in Pawtucket but the game throughout the North-East of the USA. Whilst elsewhere it entered a period of hibernation that might have easily been permanent, in Pawtucket it was reinvigorated and that reinvigoration would spread, albeit slowly, outwards.
What had happened was the creation of Pawtucket F. A., not an association as might be first assumed but a football club. Six men were responsible, five of them Scots-born or Diasporan. The Treasurer of the new club was John Kenyon, whose father was born in the English footballing hot-spot of Blackburn in Lancashire,. The President was Alexander Meiklejohn, a teacher, born in Rochdale, also in Lancashire and a football town, but whose father and four elder brothers were all born in football-mad Scotland. The first manager was a local newspaper reporter, Archibald Adam, born in Scotland and when he stepped down he was replaced by Peter Lyons, a machinist, also Scots-born. And the committee was made up of Alexander Jeffery, another machinist, and team captain, Reid, probably Glasgow-born James Stark Reid.
Games soon followed but more importantly there was a reaction still locally but elsewhere in the town and far-reaching. As at a local level several small clubs emerged at the end of that same year the Howard & Bullough works team was founded and played its first game the following one, Howard & Bullough being a spinning machinery manufacturer with its headquarters once more in Lancashire in equally football-mad Accrington but with a Pawtucket plant. Moreover, if Pawtucket F.A. had been a relatively small beginning and Howard & Bullough was a step up what happened next still in the town was a giant stride, one which began, if unintentionally, the outward ripple. 1900 saw the formation of the J & P Coats in-house club, that is the works' football team of the still larger complex that the Paisley company had invested in around the original Conant Mill. In itself that formation must surely have been enough to guarantee football's status in Pawtucket. It should also have been sufficient to re-charge New England and North-Eastern soccer but critically it would reach further still and in two ways.
The first might be said to be semi-internal. 1893 had not just seen the absorption of the Conant Mill complex but also the two Paisley thread companies of Coats and Clarks amalgamate. The combined company then had not one but two major US plants. Pawtucket was one. The original Clarks Mile End mills in Kearny in New Jersey was the other; the Clarks mills, the same Clarks mills from where America's first major club,
Clark ONT, had emerged, the same major club that also now re-emerged, reformed in 1906 as Clark Athletic Association and playing its first fixtures at the beginning of the 1906-7 season. The second was definitely external. J & P Coats would provide a blueprint for others, clubs existing and new. Over the next decade in Philadelphia Tacony became Disston, in wider Pennsylvania Bethlehem became Bethlehem Steel as in New Jersey and Massachusetts Babcock & Wilcox, General Electric and Fore River were founded and there were others.
Clarks A.A. would win the American Cup in 1907 at its first attempt, in 1908 was competing in that same competition alongside Howard and Bullough and, known as East Newark Clark A.A., would be runner-up in 1909. Howard & Bullough itself would take the American Cup in 1911. J & P Coats would enter it for the first time in 1915, reaching the semi-final, and would win the Southern New England Football League in 1918. By then Clarks had faded from the scene, notably after the death of Campbell Clark in 1912. He had been of the three Clark founders of the original club in 1883. However, both Howard & Bullough and J. & B. Coats would continue to play, if for the next decade somewhat overshadowed by a new wave of clubs mainly formed for purely commercial reasons and with on the face of it greater resources.
Nevertheless when the American Soccer League, the first openly professional league in the country, was founded in 1921 J. & B. Coats was there and started well. In the first season it finished in mid-table but the following year, incidentally with
Bob Millar
in the ranks, it tabled-topped. However, from then on it slipped back into mid-table or lower, despite reaching the semi-finals of the Challenge Cup in both 1926 and 1928. That is until the end of the 1928-29 season, at which point it dropped out at least in name for a new team, be it with an old name, to emerge to represent the town. It was Pawtucket Rangers.
In fact the situation was slightly more complicated than it appeared. It is said that in 1928 J & P Coats F.C. had financial problems. Translated that means Coats had a change of policy, not just in the USA but elsewhere in its world-wide network. It withdrew its subsidy and the club was sold, new management took over and the club renamed. However, for the new Rangers club the timing was not ideal. The American Soccer Wars had erupted. October 1929 would see the Wall Street Crash and depression set in the following year.Yet, unlike many others, it was able to play on with a rational scaling-down at first in mid-table but achieving runner-up spot in 1932-3 and reaching the semi-final of the Challenge Cup that same season. Moreover, it speaks volumes about the management and finances of the club and about the support the team must have had in the town that, even in spite of the league's 1933 collapse, it was still able to continue, albeit in changed form. When the ASL name was resurrected the following season, albeit with a new format and mostly new teams, Pawtucket Rangers was one of only two of the originals left standing. Then, whilst it lasted just a single season more playing in the ASL's New England Division until it too folded, again there was once more a rational scaling down. In 1936 a circle was completed. Out of what remained came not Pawtucket Free Wanderers or Pawtucket F.A. but Pawtucket F.C., which continued playing until war impacted in 1941, indeed topping its league that same year, and, as a final flourish, entered the National Challenge Cup the following year, 1942, as Pawtucket Rangers once more.