Bowdoin College
Maine
1794
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 Bureau when academic costume was ordered from Cotrell & Leonard, client lists for Cotrell & Leonard can help one estimate the approximate date that lining pattern was approved by the IBAC. The first time Bowdoin College appeared in an Intercollegiate Bureau document was in 1896, when the college was stated to be a client of Cotrell & Leonard in an advertisement in the 1896 Illio yearbook of the University of Illinois. The 1897 Bowdoin Bugle yearbook also included a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement, which suggests an IBAC hood assignment for Bowdoin between 1895 and 1897.
These advertisements did not describe the colors or heraldic pattern of the college’s hood lining, but Bowdoin’s lining was cited in a 1918 Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume list as being a single color of white. This description does not change in subsequent IBAC lists.
The official color for Bowdoin College is white, although black is sometimes used unofficially as a secondary color. Bowdoin faculty and students began taking research trips to the Arctic in 1860, and several Bowdoin graduates, including Thomas Hubbard (class of 1857), Robert Peary (class of 1877), and Donald MacMillan (class of 1898), were Bowdoin gradates who became important figures in late 19th and early 20th century Arctic exploration. Thus white became the school color no later than 1868 and the polar bear became the school mascot in 1913.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): white (1895-1935)
