Chartered in 1766 as Queen’s College, Rutgers was renamed in 1825 in honor of a trustee, Henry Rutgers, a brewery heir from Manhattan who was a colonel in George Washington’s army during the American Revolution. That military connection might be one reason the class of 1949 bought a cannon to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the first college football game, a 6-4 Rutgers victory over Princeton.

The Rutgers cannon usually occupies a corner of High Point Solutions Stadium in Piscataway, N.J. Originally operated by the university’s R.O.T.C., the cannon stopped working about 30 years ago. Several benevolent members of the Second Regiment Middlesex County Militia, a group of Revolutionary War re-enactors, saved the day.

“We played with it a little bit,” said Jack Nelson of Howell Township, N.J., among the four cannon operators during Rutgers’s 13-10 loss to Penn State on Sept. 13. “It started working.”

Nelson and another regular operator, Darrow Koutis of South River, N.J., wore tricorner hats with bows, blue and buff coats, and elk hide pants. “If you were lucky enough to have a uniform,” Koutis said, “this is what you had.”