The Development of TCU Football and the Construction of TCU Stadium: Building Community and Establishing Legitimacy, 1896–1930

Aerial view of Amon G. Carter Stadium at Texas Christian University, c. 1950s. The structure was known as TCU Stadium when it was completed in 1930. Courtesy of Amon G. Carter Stadium, Special Collections, Mary Couts Burnett Library, Texas Christian University.

In november 2017, Texas Christian University (TCU) announced it would seek donations to raise $100 million for the expansion of Amon G. Carter Stadium (formerly TCU Stadium), the 45,000-seat home of the Horned Frogs football team since 1930. The proposal called for the development of twenty loge suites, forty-eight luxury suites, two private clubs, 1,000 club seats, a new in-stadium video board, and year-round corporate meeting space.¹ The announcement of these modifications came five years after TCU completed a $164 million construction project on the facility. TCU Chancellor Victor Boschini suggested the renovated stadium, which featured twenty-five luxury suited and a 23,000-square-foot club and lounge (the Champions Lounge), would make the venue “the biggest building on campus and one of most important landmarks in Fort Worth.” Furthermore, Boschini argued, the building would help communicate to people that “Fort Worth is a great place and TCU is a great school.”²

TCU’s recent effort to improve its football playing facility is not unique. Many institutions have regularly improved their stadia over time to enhance the spectacle of the game and to provide greater comfort for fans, players, coaches, and other stakeholders including the media, alumni, and donors. Like many of their national and regional peers, TCU has historically supported football and the construction of stadia because the institution’s leaders have believed they could act as tools to help maintain or improve the university’s reputation. However, there is no previous work that offers a focused review of how TCU developed its early stadia or identified what specific conditions permitted TCU Stadium to surface in 1930 as a social anchor for the institution and the city of Fort Worth.³

This article describes the history of the development of TCU Stadium, which has been known as Amon G. Carter Stadium since 1951, and other football venues at Texas Christian University from 1896 to 1930. The stadium emerged because the university’s officials wished to persuade potential students, fans, donors, and business interests that TCU was an important, legitimate institution, comparable to (if not better than) other universities in the United States, especially its peers in Texas. Moreover, the structure provided a focal point for the TCU community and Fort Worth.

The United States saw a growth in the number of colleges and universities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These institutions often struggled to establish an identity and reputation that would distinguish themselves from or at least maintain parity with their peers. The establishment of academic programs, including postgraduate studies, and the construction of impressive buildings on campus were important ways institutions established their legitimacy. However, competitive sports, especially football, became another important source of identity and legitimacy by the 1890s. The construction of football stadia across the United States were legitimized by “well-intentioned progressives” to make “sport [football] permanent by creating athletic departments, constructing concrete stadiums, and hiring a corps of professional experts.”⁴

Previous studies of the history of TCU by Colby D. Hall and Joan H. Swaim produced significant scholarship that cataloged the institution’s various buildings, individuals, and critical events.⁵ Yet, those works do not adequately provide a complete picture of the place of football at TCU or offer significant information about the emergence of various stadia or fields at TCU to help us understand the importance of football as a tool for legitimacy by 1930. Additional works on the history of TCU football by Ezra Hood similarly offer little to nothing about various stadia as significant structures.⁶ Finally, other books covering the early developmental history of Fort...