Bulldogs

Jim Thorpe's signature in 1915 is what turned a local scandal into a football dynasty. The team that hired him had already died once, folded after players and bookmakers were caught fixing the outcome of a game against the Massillon Tigers in 1906. Manager Jack Cusack rebuilt the roster around Thorpe and revived the Bulldogs name, and the side went unbeaten in 1916. Two more Ohio League titles followed, in 1917 and 1919, before the Bulldogs carried that momentum into the newly formed American Professional Football Association in 1920 as charter members.

Guy Chamberlin took over as player-coach for the run that followed, and under him Canton won back-to-back NFL championships in 1922 and 1923. Pete Henry anchored the line through those seasons as a tackle who also handled the kicking, and Thorpe himself went on to serve as the league's first president.

The Bulldogs played out of League Field, a ground that held 8,000, in maroon and white. Decline came quickly once the title years ended: a 1–9–3 finish closed out their NFL membership in 1926, and a single independent season in 1927 was the last anyone fielded a team under the name before it folded for good.

The club had started, long before Thorpe or the championships, as an amateur outfit good enough to hold its own into 1902, formalised two years later as the Canton Athletic Club — the plain beginning that the Bulldogs name eventually grew out of.