Evergreen's 'Colonel Dickey' played for Heisman at Auburn in 1897

George Oliver Dickey

If you read last week’s edition of The Courant, you may have read in this space a few details about the very first Alabama-Auburn game.

That game was played in 1893 at Lakeview Park in Birmingham, and that event is described in an awesome new book called “Lost Birmingham” by Beverly Crider. After last week’s paper came out, Robert Bozeman, our publisher and editor, kindly reminded me that Conecuh County has strong ties to those early teams at Auburn University.

As many of you may know, Robert’s great-grandfather George Oliver Dickey was a member of the 1897 football team at Auburn. Dickey, who was known around Evergreen as “Colonel Dickey,” was born on Sept. 14, 1876 in Crenshaw County. As a youngster, he went to school in Luverne before moving on to Auburn University. In 1897, he played right tackle on the football team and received a gold “A” for his performance on the field.

It sounds like Colonel Dickey was a big man on campus because the 1897 edition of Auburn’s yearbook, “The Glomerata,” contains an article he wrote about “The Season of ’97.” Dickey describes how a “yellow fever scare” kept many schools from fielding football teams that year and also delayed the return of several Auburn starters. He also talked about how Auburn was scheduled to play its final game of the season against Georgia on Thanksgiving Day 1897, but Georgia cancelled that game after one of their fullbacks died in a game the week before.

1897 was the sixth year of football at Auburn, and that year’s team went 2-0-1. They opened the season by beating Mercer, 26-0, in Macon, Ga. and picked up their second win of the season the following week by beating the University of Nashville, 14-4, in Nashville. In their final game of the season, they played Sewanee to a 0-0 tie in Sewanee, Tenn.

Auburn’s game against Sewanee came just one day after their game against Nashville, and Dickey pointed out in his yearbook article that Sewanee’s trainer also umpired the game. According to Dickey, this trainer/referee supposedly said that if “Auburn had played until doomsday,” he wouldn’t have permitted them to score. Interestingly, Sewanee was Auburn’s only conference opponent that year as they were both members of the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association.

Probably the most notable thing about Auburn’s 1897 team was the fact that the head coach was none other than John Heisman, who was Auburn’s head football coach from 1895 through 1899. Heisman went 12-4-2 at Auburn and went on to post an overall coaching record of 186-70-18. The Heisman Trophy is named after him, and that individual honor is arguably the most prestigious award in all of American athletics.

Interestingly, after his football-playing days on “The Plains,” Dickey moved to Tuscaloosa, where he earned a law degree at the University of Alabama. He moved to Evergreen in 1919 and lived there until Nov. 27, 1951 when he passed away quietly at the age of 75 at his home on Main Street. Dickey’s legacy continues to live on in Conecuh County as numerous relatives remain in Evergreen to keep his memory alive. Not all of them are Auburn fans, but all of them are fans of “Colonel Dickey.”