Coe College was a client of academic costume manufacturer Cotrell & Leonard in 1904, according to an advertisement in the 22 March 1904 Coe College Cosmos newspaper. As Cotrell & Leonard was also the depository of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), the IBAC had no doubt assigned a hood lining pattern to Coe by 1904 at the latest. But no description of the college’s hood is given in this source.

Coe appears with a single-colored hood lining of purple in a c.1912 IBAC list, but this citation is erroneous; purple was not Coe’s school color. The first definitive and complete IBAC description of Coe College’s hood lining is not until 1927 where it is stated to be gold with a scarlet chevron (not crimson). By 1972 the IBAC had revised the hood description for Coe to “gold over scarlet”, which meant a division of the colors either per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar. The exact form of the division is unknown, but a book by Kevin Sheard called Academic Heraldry (1962) says that it was per chevron.

The IBAC probably redesigned Coe’s hood because other schools had been assigned similar hood linings by that point and the IBAC wanted to give Coe a new and distinctive heraldic pattern. The similar IBAC hood lining assignments included those for Loyola University in Chicago and the University of Southern California.

What was probably the original c.1904 IBAC hood lining for Coe College has been restored here.