Lehigh University
Pennsylvania
1865
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): brown/white (1895-1906): seal brown/white (1908); brown/white (1912); seal brown/white (1913); brown/white (1914-1918); seal brown/white (1923-1931); brown/white (1934-1935)
The Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) had assigned Lehigh University a hood pattern by 1897 or 1898, as the school is cited as a client of Cotrell & Leonard (the depository for the IBAC) in an advertisement in the 1898 edition of the Michiganensian yearbook.
No description of the hood design is given in this 1898 advertisement, but a 27 July 1902 IBAC list in The Argus, an Albany NY newspaper, stated that Lehigh’s hood lining was brown with a white chevron. This hood assignment remained unchanged in 1910 and c.1912 IBAC lists, but by the middle of the 1920s the IBAC was more precisely describing Lehigh’s hood lining as “dark brown” with a white chevron.
At an 1876 meeting to select the university’s colors, Lehigh students adopted brown and white, evidently because a pretty girl was wearing brown and white striped stockings to the meeting. Editions of the World Almanac from the early 1900s often describe the shade of brown as “seal brown”, which is a dark brown.
