Franklin and Marshall College
Pennsylvania
1787
Franklin & Marshall students began to use blue and white as their college colors in the 1890s. Vintage memorabilia from the college indicate that the shade of blue was dark.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/white (1895-1935)
Cotrell & Leonard was a 19th century academic costume manufacturing firm that supplied caps, gowns, and hoods to most of the prestigious colleges and universities in the US. Gardner Cotrell Leonard, one of the partners in this firm, was Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), an organization founded in 1887 to compile data on European and American academic costume. Leonard was also a consultant to the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume, which on 16 May 1895 approved a voluntary system of academic costume that quickly became the standard followed by most American colleges and universities.
Two years before the Intercollegiate Code was created, Leonard wrote an article called “The Cap and Gown in America” for the December 1893 issue of The University Magazine. In this article Leonard described various types of caps and gowns currently used by American colleges and universities, and encouraged more schools to adopt academic costume. In this article Leonard mentioned several institutions that used cap and gown; these were no doubt clients of the Cotrell & Leonard firm where he worked. So when the 1895 Intercollegiate Code was authorized and the IBAC began assigning hood lining patterns for each college or university that adopted the Code, clients of Cotrell & Leonard would probably have been some of the first to have had hood lining patterns assigned to them.
Franklin & Marshall College was mentioned in “The Cap and Gown in America” as having adopted academic costume, so the IBAC is likely to have assigned a hood lining pattern to the college in 1895 or soon after. But Franklin & Marshall’s colors and the arrangement of those colors in the lining of the hood were not cited until a 1927 Intercollegiate Bureau list that described the college’s hood as Yale blue with an inverted white chevron, a description that did not change in IBAC materials thereafter.
The Bureau typically used “Yale blue” to describe a dark blue shade. The IBAC reversed the direction of the Franklin & Marshall’s chevron to avoid confusion with the hood already assigned to Pennsylvania State University (navy blue with a white chevron).