People gather at a tailgate before a football game at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., in the fall of 1970.
Modern tailgating emerged out of the Northeast, where wealthy Ivy Leaguers owned cars. Tailgating didn’t get its name until the 1950s, the era of land yacht station wagons like the Ford Country Squire, Chevy Suburban and Chrysler Town & Country that used their back doors as serving stations for pregame festivities. But the parking lot picnics have been around for far, far longer than 70 years.
In a 2015 study of tailgating behavior, a pair of University of Notre Dame anthropologists linked tailgating to ancient Roman celebrations called “Vestival,” which brought together widespread communities to commemorate the harvest and coming of winter. That’s quite a stretch. But in late 18th-century France, a macabre tradition very much like tailgating emerged.
Thousands would bring lunches (and plenty to drink) to public squares to prepare to witness executions, sometimes by guillotine. During the U.S.
Civil War, there was an actual tailgate-like gathering. Here’s how American Heritage magazine described it in a 2005 article titled “Tailgating: The History": “Consider the Battle of Bull Run in 1861. Enthusiastic Union supporters from the Washington, D.
C., area arrived with baskets of food and shouts of 'Go Big Blue!' to watch the opening battle in America’s Civil War. “Historians generally agree this was a case of the right idea at the wrong time, war not be.