The road to a building: Rutgers, the unbuilt years, and Kings Mills

1949 – 1992

The Hall was founded in 1951 by the National Football Foundation, and its first class that year — thirty-two players and twenty-two coaches, Red Grange, Jim Thorpe and Knute Rockne among them — was elected to a hall that had no building. The site had been chosen in 1949: Rutgers University at New Brunswick, New Jersey, picked by a vote of sportswriters, coaches and athletic leaders because Rutgers and Princeton had played the first intercollegiate game there on November 6, 1869. Rutgers donated land near its stadium, office space and administrative support, and the Foundation collected donations toward construction for years. The ground was never broken. The New Jersey Attorney General opened an investigation of the Foundation's finances; the Foundation moved its operations to New York City and kept collecting; the New York Attorney General's office began its own investigation; and the Foundation moved again, this time to Kings Mills, Ohio, in suburban Cincinnati.

At Kings Mills a building finally rose, adjacent to the Kings Island amusement park, and opened in 1978 — some listings date the Kings Mills building to 1972; the Hall's standard history gives 1978. The bet was that the park's crowds would spill into the Hall, and they did not. Attendance had been projected at 300,000 a year; it peaked at about 80,000 a year and dwindled to about 30,000. The facility closed in 1992. The lesson the Foundation carried out of Ohio was plain in its own telling: a hall of fame standing alone beside an amusement park, drawing only the people who came for the park, could not live. What it needed was a city that wanted it as a civic institution. In September 1991 the Foundation opened a national search for a new home, soliciting bids first from the thirty-five cities that held local National Football Foundation chapters. South Bend was one of them.

Sources:

1. National Football Foundation — the Hall's founding in 1951 and the first class, from the Foundation's class records and its published Hall of Fame history.
2. College Football Hall of Fame, institutional history — the 1949 Rutgers selection and the reason for it, the donated land and the unbroken ground, the two attorneys general investigations, the Kings Mills building and its 1978 opening, the 300,000 projection against the 80,000 peak and 30,000 dwindle, and the 1992 closing; the September 1991 national search and the thirty-five chapter cities.