Crawford Blagden (March 2, 1881 – January 11, 1937) was an

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with ...

player. He played

college football College football (french: Football universitaire) refers to gridiron football played by teams of student athletes. It was through college football play that American football rules first gained popularity in the United States. Unlike most ...

for the

Harvard Crimson football The Harvard Crimson football program represents Harvard University in college football at the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA). Harvard's football program is one of the oldest in the world, having begun ...

team and was selected as a consensus All-American at the tackle position in 1901. Crawford was born in 1881 in New York City. His grandfather, Luther C. Clark, was one of the founders of the banking firm, Clark, Dodge & Co. He attended

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, where he played for the

team. In 1901 he was selected as a consensus All-American tackle. The 1901 Harvard team defeated rival Yale by a score of 17 to 0. After graduating from Harvard, Blagden served as the line coach at Harvard under

Percy Haughton Percy Duncan Haughton (July 11, 1876 – October 27, 1924) was an American football and baseball player and coach. He served as head football coach at Cornell University from 1899 to 1900, at Harvard University from 1908 to 1916, and at Columbia ...

. In 1914, with the outbreak of war in Europe, Blagden and

Grenville Clark Grenville Clark (November 5, 1882 – January 13, 1967) was a 20th-century American Wall Street lawyer, co-founder of Root Clark & Bird (later Dewey Ballantine, then Dewey & LeBoeuf), member of the Harvard Corporation, co-author of the book '' Wo ...

developed the idea to develop camps to train civilians for potential wartime service as officers. These camps at

Plattsburgh, New York Plattsburgh ( moh, Tsi ietsénhtha) is a city in, and the seat of, Clinton County, New York, United States, situated on the north-western shore of Lake Champlain. The population was 19,841 at the 2020 census. The population of the surrounding ...

, became the

Citizens' Military Training Camp Citizens' Military Training Camps (CMTC) were military training programs of the United States. Held annually each summer during the years 1921 to 1940, the CMTC camps differed from National Guard and Organized Reserve training in that the program a ...

. When the United States entered

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

, Blagden was trained at Plattsburgh and served as a lieutenant-colonel in the

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cla ...

in France. In 1918, he led an advance by the 317th Infantry to rescue the survivors of the so-called " Lost Battalion" from the Argonne Forest in France. After the war, Blagden worked for Atlantic Navigation Corporation and later for Joseph Walker & Sons, a stock brokerage company. He retired in 1932. Blagden was married twice. In 1911, he was married to Mary Hopkins, a granddaughter of Williams College president Mark Hopkins. They had a son, Crawford Blagden, Jr. His first wife died in 1912. In 1918, he married his second wife, Minna E. MacLeod of Nova Scotia. In January 1936, Blagden died at the Harkness Pavilion of Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center after suffering an attack of influenza. He was 55 years old when he died.

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Blagden, Crawford 1881 births 1937 deaths All-American college football players American football tackles Harvard Crimson football coaches Harvard Crimson football players United States Army colonels United States Army personnel of World War I Players of American football from New York City