Tonawanda Kardex Lumbermen
defunct American football team
The Tonawanda Kardex (also known as the Tonawanda Lumbermen and during its first season, the All-Tonawanda Lumberjacks) was an American football team active between 1916 and 1921. It played its games in Tonawanda, New York, a suburb of Buffalo with close ties to North Tonawanda, New York where American Kardex was founded. The team is most notable for its one game as a member of the American Professional Football Association (now the National Football League) in the 1921 season. They are easily the shortest-lived team in the league's history, and the shortest-lived known team in North American major league sports history.
Early history
Professional football was being played in Tonawanda by no later than 1913 (this terminus ad quem comes from records that show the team lost to the Lancaster Malleables in the region's showcase Thanksgiving game that year). They played their home games on the Tonawanda High School field, sometimes drawing up to 3,500 fans for a game. For the team's entire history, it was coached by Syracuse standout Walter "Tam" Rose. In 1917, it defeated the Rochester Jeffersons for the state championship. In 1919, it made the state playoffs but lost in the semifinals to the Buffalo Prospects, who went on to win the title.
The 1920 All Tonawanda Lumberjacks were a very successful team, garnering a record of 7–1 against two local American Professional Football Association (the predecessor to the NFL) franchises and other independent teams, only allowing more than 6 points in one of their contests (the one loss, a 35–0 decision to Buffalo).
“Tonawanda Kardex Lumbermen” enters the record as defunct American football team. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tonawanda, Kardex and Lumbermen can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tonawanda Kardex Lumbermen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.