Norwich University
Vermont
1819
The original colors of Norwich University were garnet and gold, but around 1895 they were changed to maroon and old gold.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): maroon/old gold (1917-1918); maroon/gold (1923-1931); maroon/old gold (1934-1935)
Norwich University may have been an early client of Cotrell & Leonard, the depository for the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC). The university is one of the schools in a list of college colors compiled by the 1894-95 Intercollegiate Commission to accompany the text of the Intercollegiate Code in 1895 that was sent to the 1896 Living Church Quarterly, published in December 1895. Most of the college color information in this appendix was copied from information in the 1894 World Almanac. But Norwich was not cited in that edition of the World Almanac, which suggests that the university’s maroon and old gold color information came from Cotrell & Leonard. How these two colors were heraldically arranged in Norwich’s hood lining was not described.
Similarly, the chapter on American academic hoods in the 1923 edition of The Degrees and Hoods of the World’s Colleges and Universities by Frank Haycraft included a summary of the 1895 Code and a long list of schools, each with a description of its hood lining. The chapter was written in a way that implied that this list was from the IBAC. Actually, most of Haycraft’s American hood information was out of date (from c.1912) or inaccurate, derived from a chart of college colors in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, with the first color in this chart interpreted by Haycraft to indicate the lining color of the school’s hood and the second color in the chart interpreted to indicate the chevron color of the school’s hood.
That said, some of the schools in Haycraft’s book did not appear in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, or are listed differently in those sources. So apparently Haycraft was given a partial list of college and university hoods from the IBAC and he supplemented that list with additional schools from the 1909 or 1910 World Almanac. Norwich was an example of one of the institutions that did not appear in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, which suggests that the university’s hood lining description cited by Haycraft was probably from information he received from the IBAC around 1912.
Haycraft described Norwich’s hood lining as maroon with a gold (not old gold) chevron. It is not known why the Bureau was by this point citing a gold-colored chevron instead of the correct university color of old gold.
The first definitive Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume description of the university’s hood is from 1927; here it was likewise described as maroon with a gold chevron. By 1972, however, the IBAC had corrected the color of Norwich’s chevron to the university’s traditional school color of old gold. Unfortunately, this was a duplication of the hood lining that had been assigned to Boston College (maroon with an old gold chevron) by 1927 at the latest. Here this duplication has been corrected by inverting the old gold chevron in Norwich’s maroon hood lining, a heraldic pattern the IBAC was using by 1927 to avoid duplications of this type, though not in this case.