Family tie reveals more about Old Oaken Bucket

The Old Oaken Bucket, deeply rooted in Indiana’s farming history and its top sports rivalry, has an origin story dating from a 17th century house along the historic Massachusetts coast between Boston and Plymouth.

In 1675, exactly 250 years before the Old Oaken Bucket trophy was established in 1925, a man by the name of John Northey Jr. came to a farm in Scituate, Massachusetts, and built a house for his new bride. The property came to be known as the Old Oaken Bucket Homestead. This is no coincidence.  

The iconic trophy and the historic house share their names with a poem about an old well and the scenes of the writer and poet Samuel Woodworth’s childhood. “The Old Oaken Bucket” was at one time very popular, having been set to music and sung by school-age children. Bing Crosby released his own musical version of the poem in 1941.

The historical tie came to light when Carol Shelby, Purdue’s senior director of environmental health and public safety, started doing some genealogical research. As she inched back through generations, she found that her eighth great-grandfather was the one that built the Old Oaken Bucket house.

“I had researched my genealogy [on Ancestry.com] as far back as John Northey Jr. and someone had put a picture associated with his name that said the Old Oaken Bucket house,” Shelby said. “I saw that and it didn’t connect at first, due to the distance between Massachusetts and Indiana. As the Old Oaken Bucket game approached,  I started looking into it further and reached out to the historical society for verification.”

Woodworth grew up on the Scituate (pronounced Sit-chew-it) property built by Northey, having moved there in 1798 when his father married a Northey. According to the Scituate Historical Society, elements of the original house are still there including parts of the floorboards, walls, joinery and fireplace. The well that started it all remains, but the well sweep and bucket are a replica.

Why an old oaken bucket as a trophy? “[Alumni] decided that an old oaken bucket would be a typically Hoosier kind of trophy,” wrote George Ade in September 1940 in an essay now housed in Purdue’s Archives and Special Collections library. Ade was a Purdue alumnus, humor columnist and playwright and he was instrumental in creating Purdue’s Ross-Ade Stadium.

Alumni of Purdue and Indiana shared Woodworth’s sentiments about an old oaken bucket. They too believed their rural childhoods could be summed up through the image of drinking cool, fresh water from a well.

Author and historian John Norberg says evidence indicates the Woodworth poem and the football trophy are connected.

"The 20th century was bringing rapid changes, and these were people reminiscing about and longing for their rural Indiana childhood," Norberg says. "Although I've never seen a quote from members of the committee of Purdue and IU alumni who came up with this idea saying they got the idea for the bucket from the poem, they were certainly mindful of the poem, liked its sentiments and knew everyone would recall the poem when they heard the trophy was an Old Oaken Bucket.

"When members of the committee got the idea and announced the trophy they had settled on they called it an 'Old Oaken Bucket' -- that's a line taken directly from the poem and song that was firmly planted in the minds of everyone. They didn't say they were looking for a 'pail,' as they were sometimes called, or for a 'new' bucket or a 'metal' bucket or even an 'oak' bucket. They were looking for an 'Old Oaken Bucket,' taken directly from the poem."

As if this story doesn’t have enough connections, Shelby has one more connection to the Old Oaken Bucket game. She doesn’t just attend the game, but has spent many years leading the multijurisdictional public safety team on home football game days.  She also has learned some genealogical facts, including that she, like everyone else, has 1,024 eighth great-grandparents.

“It’s highly likely there is someone else at Purdue out of the 12,000 faculty and staff that that is related to the Old Oaken Bucket story, too,” Shelby said.

More information

The Boilermakers will take on Indiana at the Old Oaken Bucket game at noon Saturday (Nov. 30) at Ross-Ade Stadium. Tickets are available here. 

Writer: Madison Sanneman, msannema@purdue.edu