Team Photograph of the Portsmouth Shoe-Steels at Labold Field

Members of the Portsmouth Shoe-Steels, the city’s first professional football team and predecessors of the NFL Spartans, were captured in this team photo from 1927. Notably, Jim Thorpe, the team’s player-coach, is absent; and nor is Jack Creasy, the organizer and manager of the team, to be seen. As one of only two known extent photographs of the Shoe-Steel team, this photograph was selected for inclusion by Robert Dafford in his flood wall mural depicting the history of Thorpe and the Shoe-Steels of 1927.