Image. Battle of the Marne trophy

Birmingham-Southern College was created on May 30, 1918, when two Alabama Methodist schools for higher education merged. On January 25, 1856, The General Assembly of Alabama passed an act to incorporate the Southern University in Greensboro, Alabama. The North Alabama Methodist Conference was granted fifteen acres of land on a hill overlooking Bessemer and Birmingham. Owenton College opened on this spot in 1898; the name changed to Birmingham College in 1906. The two colleges suffered considerably both financially and in student enrollment during the Great War. Rather than face both colleges closing, they merged opening as Birmingham-Southern College in 1918.

A rivalry was born between the two Christian colleges in Birmingham, the Baptist Howard College and the Methodist Birmingham College, when both met on the gridiron for the first time in 1906. It was this rivalry that opened the newly built 21,000 seat stadium Legion Field in 1927. It was at this game The Birmingham News donated a trophy to the commemorate "Birmingham’s Own Classic." Howard College won it that first year and held onto it, prominently displaying it in the campus library, for a couple of years.

For five years, in the mid-1920’s boys from both universities were engaged in a prank war every football season. Perhaps the most memorable of these pranks was in 1926 when a group of Howard students kidnapped the taxidermized panther mascot from the Birmingham-Southern science hall in the middle of the night. Once back on Howard’s campus they let their mascot, the living bulldog, damage the stuffed cat. They then returned the damaged mascot in an ambulance with 12 carload of screaming Howard students tailing behind.