Marathon & Beyond -- The web site for marathoners and ultrarunners.

Marathon and Beyond

News You Can Use -- History

Boston Marathon: The First Century of the World's Premier Running Event

The Start at Metcalf's Mill
Monday, April 19, 1897
18 Men to Race Today in Marathon
by Tom Derderian

Monday, April 19, 1897, 12:15 p.m. Tom Burke dug his heel into one side of the hard and narrow dirt road in front of Metcalf's Mill in Ashland, Massachusetts. He dragged his hell to the other side of the road and stood there, about 25 miles west of the Boston Athletic Association track on Irvington Street in the Back Bay. As the double gold medalist sprinter from the first modern Olympic Games held in Athens the previous year, Burke was the most celebrated member of the association. Thus cam to him the distinction of starting the runners in a new kind of race in America, a marathon. There had been only one other in the country. Burke drew the line without ceremony; the race needed a starting line and he had his boots on. Burke called out numbers for 18 men, 15 answered and stood next to the scuffed line. Burke had no gun. At exactly 12:19 he shouted "Go!" to start the BAA marathon.

Officials of the BAA observed the race with pride, knowing they had created something important. Reporters from all the Boston newspapers had come to watch. Burke and the BAA's John Graham had arrived with the reporters by the 9:12 train from the B & A Railway station on Boston's Kneeland Street. That Monday morning Patriots' Day train from Boston to Ashland bulged with the wheels and equipment of the Company B, Second Regiment and the ambulance corps, both of whom would accompany the "peds" along their route by bicyle to see to their needs.

Graham had represented the Boston Athletic Association when he attended the Olympic marathon, the world's first, in Athens in 1896. The appeal of long-distance racing centered on its danger. The ancient Greeks had no marathon or any such long race in their Olympic Games, but every American and European schoolboy had heard of the sacrifice of Pheidippides, the Greek soldier who, it was told, ran from the Plains of Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over the invading Persians, and then dropped dead. The lesson was obvious: Someday you too may be called to sacrifice for your country. So the Olympic Games had to have a long race.

That first modern Olympic marathon was won by a Greek water carrier named Spiridon Louis. It ran from the Plains of Marathon through the flat village of Nea Makri past Rafina along the Pendeli hills up a 7-mile climb into the Hymettus hills then down 6 miles and into the new 50,000-capacity marble Panathinaikon Stadium near the Acropolis. Louis won the world's first marathon in 2 hours 58 minutes, 50 seconds. He was Greek, just like Pheidippides. It was perfect: The man matched the myth. The victory thrilled the men from Boston. How would BAA officials find a course like that near their city, the one they considered the Athens of the New World?

The officials from the BAA set out to design a course to match the original in Greece. They picked for the start a spot in Ashland, 25 miles west of the nearest thing they had to a stadium, the 220-yard Irvington Street Oval that served as their running track. The oval did not have 50,000 seats or even a chip of marble, the Newton hills weren't a very close match for the Hymettus hills and Ashland, unlike Marathon, was not a plain, but the railroad did run in that direction.

The night before the first Boston Marathon, the six runners from New York, including Hamilton Gray and John J. McDermott, took their evening meal together in the dining room of the Central House in Ashland at a table apart from the Boston runners. Long before the days of carbohydrate loading, the meal of a marathoner on the night before the race, like that of a soldier on the eve of battle, took on the importance of the biblical Last Supper. McDermott and Gray, gaunt and lean, looked like they had trained well for distance running. One Boston observer noted that neither carried "an ounce of superfluous flesh." Clearly a rivalry had quickly developed between the host Bostonians and the invading New Yorkers.

Moments after the start Dick Grant seized the lead. He was the only man in the field without a handler to give him water and attend to his needs. Bostonians had their hopes and money on Grant, a Harvard man with a background in track racing. He felt the bright sun on his right shoulder and a cool west wind on his back. He felt the stiff leather soles of his black leather shoes slap the hard dirt road. Cross-country runner Hamilton Gray, running for the St. George AC (athletic club) of New York, followed him and matched strides. They made little puffs of dust with each unified footfall. The Boston Globe reporter's postrace story, in the lurid prose of the day, noted that "the sleepy old town rang with the cheers of her lusty sons."

As Grant and Gray ran, Gray's handler rode up and handed him a water canteen. He took a drink, then handed the rest to Grant. The two certainly felt a competition, one against the other, but they also held a common cause against the enormous distance. Fear of 25 miles bound them. What would happen to the human body while trying to race that distance was unknown. A man could drop dead, use himself up, shorten his life-or, most likely, break down and never reach Boston.

So great was their respect for the distance that J.J. Kiernan, representing the St. Bartholomew AC of New York, and John J. McDermott, a lithographer by trade, of the Pastime AC of New York, ran softly 30 yards behind hardrunning Grant and Gray at South Framingham. McDermott at 123-1/2 pounds was the only man in the field who had won a marathon, the only other one yet held in America. The Knickerbocker AC sponsored the first-in-America race from Stamford, Connecticut, to New York City in 1896. That race had been a muddy slog-only a third of the field had finished, and it had taken McDermott 3:25:55. He traveled at a much faster rate now, but he did not know if he could keep up his pace. The newspapers considered McDermott the man who would reach Boston first, but no one knew much about what would happen in the race.

After leaving South Framingham the cyclists fell into a line as each spun up a cyclone of dust. People on horseback and in wagons followed. The loose road dirt rose on the spokes of each wagon wheel, then spilled off in cascades of dust. The papers described that, "the houses all along the line were filled with people and many handkerchiefs and good wishes were wafted upon the beautiful April day as the men with faces set, kept on."

The papers further reported that as Grant passed Wellesley College, the girls lining the streets cheered, "'Rah,' for Harvard" as if they were at a football game. Behind Grant, McDermott ran with beautiful form. McDermott caught the leaders on the hills between Wellesley and Newton. He took the heart out of Gray, who stopped to walk. As McDermott charged past on a downhill, Grant gave chase: "Although nearly played out he clung to the heels of the NY flyer." Grant grabbed a tiger by the tail. He had the speed to match McDermott, but McDermott's cautious early pace, his experience with a previous marathon, and probably greater conditioning allowed him to continue without slowing. Grant did not dare drop back; he wanted to win, so he clung for a mile to his relentless tiger on a downhill until the base of the next hill.

There, Grant staggered a few steps and quit running. McDermott continued. Grant walked to the top of the hill, arriving just in time to see McDermott turn the corner and disappear. Seeing a street-watering cart (used to keep dust down on town roads), Grant signaled the driver to stop. Grant lay in the street and asked the driver to run water over him. Once refreshed he tried to run again, but his feet were too badly blistered. He hobbled. Dick Grant, trained to race on the track, the man with the greatest speed in the field, was forced to leave the race. But the race would not leave him. The idea of winning the Boston Marathon would not leave him.

At Auburndale McDermott commanded nearly a mile lead. The churning and mobile bicycling, buckboard, horseback, electric-car crowd gathered around him so closely that his attendants had to work to keep the path open. McDermott plodded on in a pandemonium of dust. He asked attendant Eddie Heinlein to tell him when he had passed 20 miles. At the Evergreen Cemetery, a quarter mile from the Chestnut Hill reservoir, McDermott stopped to walk for the first time. He walked 220 yards, then suddenly sprinted for 200 more until a violent cramp seized his left leg. He stopped, and Heinlein pummeled his leg vigorously to exorcise the cramp amid the applause of the spectators.

Many thought he was gone, finished, and regardless of his position in the lead would have to retire from the race, but he held his leg stiff and yelled to Heinlein, "Rub!" Heinlein tore at the cramp with his fingers and held the quivering muscle fibers apart until they relaxed.

The cured McDermott jumped back into the race and ran on Beacon Street to Coolidge Corner and to St. Paul Street, where he walked to Carleton Street. Blisters filled his shoes, and the skin had begun to peel off the soles of his feet. When he heard that a runner had just come over the hill, he "shut his teeth and set his face and leaning well forward dug his shoes into the hard Beacon Street." Spectators said that he ran up the hill like a half-miler and down the other side to Commonwealth Avenue and across Massachusetts Avenue. There, sweaty and dusty, he plunged into the dignity of a funeral procession as it moved along Massachusetts Avenue. He so startled the drivers of two electric cars that they stalled their vehicles.

At the Irvington Oval spectators filled every available foot of standing room. "The fences were black with boys, young men and women." They had watched the BAA Open Handicap games, a track-and-field meet where slower runners started sooner so that often the races became great catch-up dramas (and better fodder for wagers, as the last starter, called the scratch man, tried to catch the runner who started with the gun and all those in between), where A.W. Foote of Yale had won the mile time prize in 4:48. McDermott, now weighing 114-1/2 pounds, ran onto the track and completed the 220-yard lap in exactly 40 seconds. The crowd pressed forward, "wishing to grasp the hand of the winner of the first marathon run in Massachusetts." The police "forgot their duty." The crowd hoisted McDermott onto their shoulders. "It was by the hardest kind of reasoning [Did he punch someone?] that he escaped and ran to the B.A.A. Clubhouse."

Newspapers proclaimed McDermott's time of 2:55:10-10 seconds faster than Spiridon Louis had run in Greece and faster than he himself had run 6 months earlier-was a new world's record and that McDermott was the marathon champion of America and the world.

"Grant is the hardest man I ever beat," McDermott told the Globe reporter. "He held me for a mile, although he was all pumped out. If he had trained for the race he would have given me a hard race. As it was it was hard enough to shake him. He ran the pluckiest race I ever saw." McDermott examined his feet. "This will probably be my last long race. I hate to be called a quitter and a coward, but look at my feet." They were bloody and blistered, with the skin peeling off.

But Grant and McDermott would both be back. And so would Lawrence Brignolia, a 20-year-old Cambridge oarsman finishing over an hour behind the winner. The Globe reporter described Brignolia as a "modest genial fellow [who] has a wonderful physique and confidence." He had been apprenticed to a horseshoer until age 15. Before the race Brignolia had been persuaded to take a big breakfast to prepare him for the ordeal, but he had gotten cramps while running. The 160-pound Brignolia finished in 4:06, but would train, eat carefully, and be back, too.

1897 Results
1. J. McDermott, PAC, NY 2:55:10 (*CR, **WR)
2. J. Kiernan, SBAC, NY 3:02:02
3. E.P. Rhell 3:06:02
4. H. Gray, SGAC, NY 3:11:37
5. H.D. Eggleston 3:17:50
6. J. Mason 3:31:00
7. W. Ryan 3:41:25
8. L. Brignolia 4:06:12
9. H. Leonard 4:08:00
10. A. T. Howe 4:10:00

Notes: 18 entrants, 15 starters, 10 finishers.
*CR denotes course record. **WRdenotes world record.

Past and future winners always appear in bold in the results.

Excerpted from Boston Marathon: The First Century of the World's Premier Running Event, 2nd Edition, 1996, by Tom Derderian.