📍Jim Thorpe House, 706 East Boston Avenue, Yale, OK 74085, USA
1917 – 1923“I was born in 1887 in Indian Territory, near Prague in what is now Oklahoma, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation; my Indian name, Wa-Tho-Huk, means Bright Path. I grew up on the prairie, hunting, fishing and running across the open country, and I lost my twin brother, Charlie, and both my parents while I was still young. I went to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where the coach Pop Warner made me into an athlete, and in 1912 I won the pentathlon and decathlon at the Stockholm Olympics. In September 1917, with my wife, Iva, and our young children, I bought this modest white wooden bungalow at 706 East Boston Avenue in Yale, a small oil-boom town in Payne County, Oklahoma, for 2,800 dollars. It was the only house I ever owned in Oklahoma, and it brought me home to the state where I had grown up. During those years I played professional baseball for the New York Giants and the Cincinnati Reds and professional football for the Canton Bulldogs, travelling a great deal, but Yale was where my family lived. In 1920 I became the first president of the organisation that became the National Football League. Those years in Yale were also marked by great sadness, as our little son Jim Jr. died in 1918. We left the house in 1923. In 1968 the Oklahoma Historical Society bought the home and restored it as a museum, and in 2024 it was returned to my family's foundation. Visitors can still see the rooms as we lived in them, and trophies and mementoes of my life in sport.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today