The glue of the team was the manager, Luke Lea. He was an undergraduate student who hired the football coach, recruited players, scheduled games, arranged travel, and managed the team and the equipment. He was essentially the athletic director in the days before athletic directors existed.

His achievements in 1899 foreshadowed a fascinating life—owner of the Nashville Tennessean, youngest U.S. Senator, and World War I soldier who plotted to kidnap the Kaiser.

Trickling out of a cave on the domain of the University of the South in Sewanee is a small spring called Tremlett Springs. On the daring train trip that included stops in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, the team took two barrels of spring water to ensure their health. As the victories mounted, the water took on a mythic aura of being “magical” water. Tremlett Springs still flows quietly in Abbo’s Alley.

Founded in 1857 by Episcopal clergy and lay people on top of a mountain on the Cumberland Plateau, Sewanee, as it is known, was part of a grand vision for a large, first-rate, southern university. That vision was shattered by the Civil War, which left the cornerstone destroyed by Union soldiers and Sewanee’s finances depleted. Undaunted, the surviving founders reformed Sewanee on July 4, 1868.