Vanderbilt's first football coach was born and raised in Camden, Alabama

Vanderbilt's first football team with Jones holding ball.

Many University of Alabama football fans in the reading audience are looking forward to this Saturday’s game between the No. 1-ranked Crimson Tide and the undefeated Vanderbilt Commodores in Nashville, Tenn. That game is scheduled to kick off at 2:30 p.m. and will be nationally televised on CBS.

The Alabama-Vanderbilt series traces its roots all the way back to 1903, but the Commodores actually fielded their first football team 13 years before that, in 1890. Interestingly, the beginnings of football at Vanderbilt have strong connections to Wilcox County, as the first head coach in Vanderbilt history – Elliott Hamilton Jones - was born and raised in Camden.

According to a wide variety of sources, Elliott H. Jones was born to John Archibald Jones and Mary Scott Jones in Camden on July 18, 1870, and he lived in Camden until the age of 15 when he went off to Massachusetts to attend high school at the prestigious Cambridge Latin School. In 1887, Jones entered Vanderbilt University, where he cemented himself a place in college football history.

Vanderbilt organized its first football team in the fall of 1890 and played the first game in school history that year on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 27), defeating the Nashville Peabody Normal School, 40-0, at Nashville Athletic Park. Jones served as head coach for Vanderbilt in that game, was Vanderbilt’s team captain and also played fullback. Vandy went undefeated that season because that was the only game they played that year.

Jones went on to serve as head football coach and played for the Commodores during the 1891 and 1892 seasons. In 1891, Vandy went 3-1 overall, defeating Sewanee twice and splitting a home-and-away series with Washington University of St. Louis, Mo.

During the 1892 season, the last with Jones as head coach, Vandy went 4-4, recording wins over Tennessee (twice), Peabody Normal School and Georgia Tech. Their losses came against Sewanee (twice), North Carolina and Washington University of Missouri.

Jones attended Vanderbilt from 1887 to 1893, earning his bachelor’s and law degrees, and he was also active in other sports in addition to football. He played on Vanderbilt’s baseball team for two seasons and also ran track and was on the college’s gymnasium team. In his spare time, he served as the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper.

After college, Jones moved to Kansas City, Mo., where he became a well-known, prominent lawyer with a large and important clientele. He married Mattie M. Scarritt on Dec. 27, 1894, and they went on to have a large family of children. Jones lived to the ripe old age of 81, passing away on Oct. 11, 1951, and today you can visit his grave in the Mount Washington Cemetery in Independence, Mo.

In the end, I’d like to hear from any readers with more information about Jones’ early years in Wilcox County and from anyone with more information about Jones’ prominent family. More than likely, some of his relatives still live in Wilcox County today, and I suspect they’ll get an extra big kick out of watching this Saturday’s Alabama-Vanderbilt game.