NFL History | Pro Football Hall of Fame, Canton — The Building That Found the Evidence

Canton won the Hall of Fame with an argument about two things that had happened downtown.

The first was the September 1920 meeting in Ralph Hay's automobile showroom that produced the American Professional Football Association. The second was the Canton Bulldogs, who won the league championship in 1922 and again in 1923. On 27 April 1961 the NFL selected the city as the site.

Ground was broken on 11 August 1962. The building opened to the public on 7 September 1963 with seventeen charter members, whose names had been announced that January. It was two rooms and about nineteen thousand square feet. The first expansion broke ground in April 1970, was completed on 10 May 1971 and added a room, taking the building to thirty-four thousand square feet. It has kept growing since, into a stadium and a surrounding development, and those first two rooms are buried somewhere inside all of it.

One absence is worth carrying here from the corner two miles south. Ralph Hay called both 1920 meetings, chaired the second, wrote the invitations that filled it and served as the association's first secretary. He has never been elected to the Hall his city won on the strength of what he organised. What Canton gave him instead is a plaque on the federal building that replaced his showroom.

The Hall also holds the paperwork, which is the part of it that matters most to anyone trying to establish what actually happened. The two typed pages of minutes from 17 September 1920, taken by Frank Nied of Akron on Akron team letterhead, are on display. And it was the Hall's own research, after it opened, that produced the page torn from the Allegheny Athletic Association's 1892 expense sheet recording a five-hundred-dollar game bonus to Pudge Heffelfinger. That single sheet moved the origin of professional football from Latrobe in 1895 to Pittsburgh in 1892, and it surfaced only because an institution existed whose job was to go looking.

A shrine is one way to describe this building. An archive is the more useful one.

Coordinate: the Pro Football Hall of Fame, George Halas Drive NW. Wikidata's P625 and the OpenStreetMap way for the museum are separately maintained entities and agree to within about 10 m. The US Census TIGER geocoder for 2121 George Halas Drive NW returns 40.822730, -81.397600, about 180 m north — the mailing-address-versus-footprint offset. Three sources, at the museum block. Precision ±20 m. Note for anyone re-deriving in Canton: the 2023 USFL Championship pin at 40.81987, -81.39802 is another 138 m south of this one and belongs to a different memory (3764) about a different event.

Cover: the Hall of Fame entrance and its football-shaped rotunda, 2023. Photo: WeaponizingArchitecture, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Second image: a cracked New York Giants helmet in a display case inside the Hall. Photo: Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.