The day after his 90th birthday, James Neilson (pronounced nel-son), Rutgers Class of 1866, reminisced in the November 18, 1934 Sunday Times of New Brunswick, “We didn’t have football when I was a student at Rutgers. When Rutgers and Princeton played the first intercollegiate football game in 1869 I was traveling in Europe, or I might have been on the sidelines….As a student, I did organize a crew but every time a match was arranged, they left me off. Well, I guess all those athletes have passed on but I am still around." He also served 51 years on the Board of Trustees and died the oldest Rutgers alumnus at 92 -- just 20 months before the 1938 Rutgers Stadium opening that superceded his namesake venue Neilson Field.
His grandfather was Colonel John Neilson who received and read a government approved document to the townspeople that would instantly make anyone who agreed with it (and there were many that day) guilty of treason. New Brunswick would follow readings in Philadelphia and Trenton in the days after a rider was sent out of town from Philadelphia to deliver the document. According to the October 13, 1916 Targum, a platform was erected in front of Cochrane’s Tavern at the corner of today’s Albany and Neilson Streets (not too far from the site of the first Queen’s College classes held five years earlier). Neilson began to read the words from the document (actually done in front of the nearby Christ Church) to the townspeople on July 9, 1776. He began, “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which has connected them to another…”
His grandfather was Colonel John Neilson who received and read a government approved document to the townspeople that would instantly make anyone who agreed with it (and there were many that day) guilty of treason. New Brunswick would follow readings in Philadelphia and Trenton in the days after a rider was sent out of town from Philadelphia to deliver the document. According to the October 13, 1916 Targum, a platform was erected in front of Cochrane’s Tavern at the corner of today’s Albany and Neilson Streets (not too far from the site of the first Queen’s College classes held five years earlier). Neilson began to read the words from the document (actually done in front of the nearby Christ Church) to the townspeople on July 9, 1776. He began, “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which has connected them to another…”
