Editor’s note: An occasional series exploring the history of the Florida Gators and the traditions of Gator Nation.
 
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The vastly different eras hit me before ever leaving the parking lot outside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium on Monday afternoon. A long line of youth football players waited in the summer sun to enter the Gators’ practice facility for a camp.

Meanwhile, no one was at the place I was headed. A playground sat empty. Across SW Sixth Avenue, two small houses rested quietly underneath large, leafy trees. Adjacent to the fenced playground on the other side of SW Third Street, rows of vegetables grew in a community farm as the sound of a lawnmower echoed in the distance. Not a galloping ghost in sight.

I had never been to the Porters Community Center, a few blocks west of downtown Gainesville. The small community center serves residents of Porters Quarters, a historically black neighborhood founded in the 1880s by Canadian physician Dr. Watson Porter, who reportedly only sold real estate to African Americans.

Curiosity led me there on a typical sweltering June afternoon in Florida. Was this the place where the University of Florida football team played its first game?

As the Gators prepare for their 96th season at Florida/Spurrier Field, it’s difficult to imagine a Florida home game anywhere other than “The Swamp.” More challenging is trying to picture what a game sounded and looked like 119 years ago when the Gators defeated the Gainesville Athletic Club 16-6 on Oct. 5, 1906, in the first game in program history.

On the day the game took place, players, fans and Coach James Forsyth witnessed the same vivid colors we see today: dirt stains on uniforms, shadows from clouds above, a blue sky and green grass. Of course, what images exist from that period in history are black and white, a time far removed from the iPhone and Instagram culture of today.

The American sports world was in its infancy. In an all-Chicago affair, the White Sox beat the Cubs in 1906 in only the third World Series in history. Sir Huon won the Kentucky Derby, and the biggest football news was the intervention of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to create a rules committee and demand that football become safer after the Chicago Tribune reported 19 players were killed in 1905. The NFL, NBA and NHL had not been born.

A significant development from the rules committee was the legalization of the forward pass to open up the game, and historians credit St. Louis University’s Bradbury Robinson for throwing the first legal forward pass in a game against Cornell on Sept. 5, 1906. Future Gators quarterback and coach Steve Spurrier is forever grateful.

But let’s return to the present. I had heard about a historical marker at the Porters Community Center in honor of “The Ballpark,” the fenced-in field that once hosted local baseball games and served as the UF football team’s first home field. Local historian Fred Awbrey wrote about the Gators’ connection to “The Ballpark” in 2015 in an article I had never read until Monday.

Coincidentally, that was not the first time Awbrey had surfaced on my radar. In 2016, his research helped correct historical errors in Florida’s media guide, and I wrote about it at the time. According to Awbrey’s detailed dive into history, UF played 15 home games at “The Ballpark” from 1906-10. The Gators – before they were even known as the Gators – went 14-0-1 there, the only blemish a 5-5 tie against Stetson in 1909 (touchdowns counted for five points until 1912). UF purchased the grandstand and wooden fence that surrounded “The Ballpark” at the end of the 1910 season and moved it all to campus, north of where Ben Hill Griffin Stadium sits today. The area is now a parking lot and tailgate site on game day, but back then, it was Florida’s home field and eventually became known as Fleming Field.

The Gators played football and baseball on Fleming Field and hosted major league teams on barnstorming tours as they headed north from spring training. Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Mel Ott and Rogers Hornsby are a few of the Hall of Famers who played there. Yes, Awbrey has written about Fleming Field’s history, too.

Meanwhile, as soon as I parked in front of the Porters Community Center and walked toward the vacant playground, I saw the historical marker. It looks like any other historical marker, and unless you get out and read closely, you would never know that a day long ago, the Gators called this patch of earth their home field. I stood there and attempted to recreate a scene more than a century old in my head. Sometimes, it’s easy. But so much has changed from where the field once was; this time, it felt impossible.

That earth has been bulldozed and sold and broken into lots in the decades since “The Ballpark” closed, but for the first five seasons, it was Florida’s home field.

The Gators’ first home. Then and forever.