Gettysburg College
Pennsylvania
1832
Formerly “Pennsylvania College”
In the spring of 1889, Pennsylvania College students decided to order beanie caps (called “dinks”) in the college colors of scarlet and “deep canary”, which had been adopted in 1882. When the committee contacted a cap salesman, he said that his company didn’t have scarlet and deep canary caps in stock and that it would be difficult to manufacture caps in those colors, but he had orange and blue caps on hand and ready to be shipped. So Pennsylvania College students voted unanimously to order beanie caps in those two colors and to make them the new colors of the college. After faculty ratified the student motion on 4 April 1889, orange and blue became the official colors of Pennsylvania College. The shade of blue was dark.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): orange/blue (1895); orange/dark blue (1896); orange/navy blue (1897); orange/dark blue (1900-1902); old gold/blue (1914); orange/navy blue (1915); orange/blue (1916-1935)
Gardner Cotrell Leonard was the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) and also a partner at Cotrell & Leonard, one of the major manufacturing firms for academic dress in the United States. Because the relationship between the IBAC and Cotrell & Leonard was tight (contemporary materials described Cotrell & Leonard as the “depository” for the Bureau), it is likely that a school was assigned an academic hood lining pattern by the IBAC when that school made a purchase order for academic costume from Cotrell & Leonard. If this is correct, Cotrell & Leonard advertisements from the turn of the century can provide one with a rough estimation of the date when the hood lining pattern of a particular college or university was first registered by the Intercollegiate Bureau.
Gettysburg College was first referenced (without a description of its hood) in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the April 1907 edition of the Gettysburg College Mercury, which suggests a 1906 or 1907 registry by the Intercollegiate Bureau. The first full description of the college’s hood lining can be found in the middle of the 1920s, where it was described as orange with a navy blue chevron – a duplication of the hood lining the IBAC had also assigned to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and the University of Florida.
So to avoid this problem, in the late 1940s or 1950s the Bureau apparently reversed both the colors and the chevron of Gettysburg’s hood: a 1972 IBAC list described the college’s hood lining as navy blue with an inverted orange chevron. Along with the new arrangement of colors the Bureau inverted Gettysburg’s chevron to avoid duplicating the hood lining of the University of Virginia (navy blue with an orange chevron).
Gettysburg’s new hood lining arrangement (navy blue with a reversed orange chevron) had originally been assigned to Highland University in Kansas, but Highland had become a two year college in 1920 and no longer used academic hoods.