Until his death in 1921, Gardner Cotrell Leonard was the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) and a partner in the firm of Cotrell & Leonard, an academic costume manufacturer and the depository for the records of the IBAC. If one assumes that a college or university was assigned a hood lining pattern by the Intercollegiate Bureau when academic costume was ordered from Cotrell & Leonard, client lists for Cotrell & Leonard can help one estimate the approximate date that a lining pattern was approved by the Bureau.

The first time Amherst College appeared in an Intercollegiate Bureau document was in 1896, when the college was cited as a client of Cotrell & Leonard in an advertisement in the second volume of a photographic album entitled Souvenir of the University of Michigan. A reporter covering commencement ceremonies at the University of Chicago for the Indianapolis News (9 July 1896) also mentioned Amherst as one of a number of colleges and universities that used academic costume. These sources would suggest an IBAC hood assignment for the college in 1895 or 1896, but neither one described the colors or heraldic pattern of Amherst’s hood lining.

The college’s hood is first definitively cited in the 27 July 1902 edition of The Argus, an Albany NY newspaper, which contained a list of IBAC hood lining patterns that had been assigned to some of the more prestigious colleges and universities of the time. Here Amherst’s hood lining was described as purple with a white chevron. This description never changed in subsequent IBAC lists.