The Aggie Bonfire was a long-standing annual tradition at Texas A&M University as part of the college rivalry with the University of Texas at Austin. For 90 years, Texas A&M students—known as Aggies—built a bonfire on campus each autumn, known to the Aggie community simply as "Bonfire". The event symbolized Aggie students' "burning desire to beat the hell outta t.u.", a nickname for the University of Texas.
The bonfire was traditionally lit around Thanksgiving in conjunction with festivities surrounding the annual football game. Early bonfires were little more than piles of trash, but the event gradually became more organized and eventually grew to an immense size, setting the world record in 1969. In 1999, the Bonfire collapsed during construction, killing 12 and injuring 27 others. The accident led Texas A&M to declare a hiatus on an official Bonfire. However, since 2002, a student-sponsored coalition has constructed an annual unsanctioned, off-campus "Student Bonfire" in the spirit of its predecessor.
Early years
The students of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, known as Aggies, burned their first bonfire on November 18, 1907, to congratulate the football team on a recent win. The first on-campus Aggie Bonfire, a heap of trash and debris, was burned in 1909 to generate enthusiasm for a variety of sporting events. A decade later, the focus of the event narrowed to the annual rivalry game between Texas A&M and the University of Texas, held near Thanksgiving Day. Little information was recorded about the early Bonfires; the 1921 Texas A&M yearbook mentioned the "final rally" of the students before the game against Texas, but did not refer to a bonfire. Six years later, the school yearbook published a photograph of the event.
Freshmen were expected to build the early Bonfires to help prove their worth. For almost two decades, the students constructed Bonfire from debris and wood acquired through various, sometimes illicit, means, including appropriating lumber intended for a dormitory in 1912. In 1935, a farmer reported that students carried off his entire barn as fuel for Bonfire. To prevent future incidents, the university made Bonfire a school-sanctioned event. The following year, for the first time, the school provided axes, saws, and trucks for the students and pointed them toward a grove of dead trees on the edge of town.
During the 1940s, the school paper described Bonfire as "the greatest event of the football season". The 1947 Corps handbook stated that "bonfire symbolizes two things: a burning desire to beat the team from the University of Texas, and the undying flame of love that every loyal Aggie carries in his heart for the school"; this was often shortened to "the burning desire to beat the hell out of t.u." The Bonfire design changed in 1942. Universal Studios, filming the movie We've Never Been Licked on the Texas A&M Campus, built a bonfire as a prop for the movie. Their structure used a design similar to a teepee, where all the logs rested against each other in a conical shape. The logs were placed at an angle between 23 and 30 degrees, giving it "a tremendous vertical and horizontal resistance". This allowed Bonfire to grow from tall to over tall. Subsequent Aggies adopted the new idea, and the teepee design became standard for Bonfires for the next 25 years.
Beginning in 1952, the bonfires were constructed entirely from fresh-cut logs. The event suffered its first fatality in 1955, when a student was struck by a swerving car. For unrelated reasons, that same year the Bonfire was moved from Simpson Drill Field in front of the Memorial Student Center to Duncan Field, near the dorms of the Corps of Cadets (whose leaders oversaw construction). In 1957, the structure collapsed two days before Bonfire was to be held, but students worked around-the-clock to rebuild it, and the bonfire burned as scheduled.
During this period, University of Texas students attempted several stunts, trying to light the stack early, but to no avail. In both 1933 and 1948, students from UT rented an airplane and tried to drop fire bombs onto the stack. In one of these instances, the plane ran low on fuel, and was forced to land at Easterwood Airport in College Station—the wooden portions of the plane found themselves part of Bonfire that year. In 1956, there was an unsuccessful attempt to plant explosives at the Bonfire site, and, in the late 1970s, a College Station police officer was fired after trying to ignite the bonfire several days ahead of schedule. Students spotted the officer before he could succeed and chased him across campus. In 1999, a Longhorn fan hired someone to build a six-foot model airplane designed to carry a bomb into the wood stack to ignite it prematurely. "He was actually in the process of building that plane when they had the tragedy at bonfire", Mel Stekoll said. "At that point, we scrapped the plan. It would have been the next year that we planned to try it."
Organizational change and expansion
In 1965, membership in the Corps of Cadets became voluntary for students at Texas A&M. Before, Corps leaders directed construction of Bonfire. However, because the Corps had no authority over the "non-regs", or civilian students, a separate Bonfire leadership structure was instituted. The new leaders were designated with colored hard hats, or pots, with the overall leaders known as redpots.
The first Bonfire built with both Corps and non-reg participation was in 1963. The stack was scheduled to burn only days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Out of respect, the students dismantled the stack. As Head Yell Leader Mike Marlowe explained, "It is the most we have and the least we can give."
In the following years the structure became more elaborate, and in 1967 the flames could be seen away. In 1969, the stack of logs set the world record for the height of a bonfire at tall. Out of concern for the safety of participants and the community, the university limited the size to tall and in diameter. As an added precaution, nearby campus buildings were equipped with rooftop sprinkler systems. Despite the new height restrictions, in the 1970s, the Guinness Book of Records listed Aggie Bonfire as the largest bonfire in the world.
Design change Stages of bonfire construction (1970s–1999)StageDescriptionLengthApprox. startCut / loadTrees cut down, logs loaded by hand onto trucks and unloaded on campus4 weeksOctoberStackLogs wired into place against the center pole3 weeksEarly NovemberPush24/7 effort to finish the first four levels10 daysLast 10 days of StackFinishRedpots build the final two levels.1 dayDay before BurnBurnThe stack is doused with jet fuel and lit on fire.1 day1 or 2 nights before the football game versus Texas In 1978, Bonfire shifted from its previous teepee design to a wedding cake style, in which upper stacks of logs were wedged on top of lower stacks. The structure was built around a fortified center pole, made from two telephone poles spliced together by cutting matching notches, approximately long, and with of glue. Four steel plates were bolted to the two poles, and a cable wrapped around the joint and secured to the pole with steel staples. Four perimeter poles were placed away and ropes were stretched between the perimeter poles to center poles and tension placed on them to hold the center pole together. After the center pole was erected, logs were placed vertically around it in a multi-tiered wedding cake design composed of thousands of logs. By 1984, the logs were sloping only 14 degrees. The spiral arrangement of the logs was designed to make Bonfire collapse into itself in a twisting motion, thus protecting spectators. Although the tradition stated that if Bonfire burned through midnight then A&M would win the following day's football game, the introduction of the wedding cake design drastically reduced the time it took for Bonfire to fall, sometimes burning for only 30 or 45 minutes.
Despite the complexity of the design, there were no formal written instructions or architectural blueprints for the construction of Bonfire. Knowledge on how to build the structure was passed verbally from one redpot to the next. By 1999, the only written documentation on the building of Bonfire was the rough schematic printed on the back of the official Bonfire T-shirt worn by participants from the freshman honors dormitory, Lechner.
While the Bonfires of the 1960s were constructed in five to ten days, working primarily in daylight, by the late 1970s, changes in the school led to a more elaborate and lengthy construction schedule. Construction began in late October with "Cut", obtaining wood by cutting down trees with axes, which took several weekends. After Cut, students brought the logs to campus during "Load", a process by which the logs were loaded by hand onto flatbed trucks and brought to campus. In early November, crews began "Stack", a three-week period in which the logs were wired together and Bonfire took shape. Near the end of stack, known as "Push", students worked around the clock in rotating shifts. The first four of the six stacks were built with the efforts of all safety-trained participants. The day before Bonfire was scheduled to burn, junior redpots would build the fifth stack, and then senior redpots would build the sixth.
During Cut, all logs were felled by hand, with students working in teams to chop down each tree with their axes. The manual labor ensured that participants were invested in each log that went into the Bonfire. Once the trees had fallen, brownpots, the "executive lumberjacks", used chainsaws to cut limbs and prepare the logs.
To ensure safety during the Stack period, the organizers maintained a perimeter around the working area, and allowed only safety-trained students through. Cranes, donated by local construction companies, assisted in getting logs onto the upper tiers, and volunteers from those companies were on-hand at all times to offer advice. Emergency medical technicians were also required to be on site at all times and no more than 70 students at a time were allowed on the stack. Once the stack was finished, a burnt-orange outhouse with "t.u frat house" painted on the front was placed on top of the stack.
Although between two and five thousand students participated in the construction of Bonfire each year, most worked only part-time, and many worked only one or two shifts. Student workers were organized by dormitories or Corps units, with a separate off-campus student team. Many former students participated with teams they belonged to as students. Each team had assigned shifts, although individuals were not limited to working only the assigned shifts. Students working on Bonfire wore "grodes"—old T-shirts, jeans, and boots. By tradition, grodes were either not washed until after Bonfire burned or not washed at all.
In 1983, the city of College Station began manufacturing Austin city limits signs for students to place at the summit of the Bonfire so that students would stop stealing signs from Austin. The Fightin' Texas Aggie Band began building the outhouse, ending the tradition of stealing Bonfire's components.
Controversy