College of Charleston
South Carolina
1770
Maroon and white have been the colors of the College of Charleston since the mid-1800s.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): maroon/white (1917-1935)
On 16 May 1895, the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume approved a uniform system of academic costume for American colleges and universities called the “Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume”. The Intercollegiate Code stipulated that the college color or colors of the institution granting the degree would be used in the lining of the institution’s hood but did not define how multiple colors would be combined in the hood lining. One of the advisors to the Commission was Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), an organization affiliated with the academic costume manufacturing firm Cotrell & Leonard. Since 1887 the IBAC had maintained a database of information about academic regalia in the US and Europe, so the Commission entrusted the Bureau with the responsibility of assigning a unique hood lining design to every college and university that chose to adopt the Intercollegiate Code.
The Commission sent a copy of the Intercollegiate Code along with a list of schools and their colors to the Living Church Quarterly, which included this information in its 1896 edition (published in December 1895). The list of college colors the Commission appended to the Intercollegiate Code was largely copied from the 1894 World Almanac. But some colleges and universities in the Commission’s list do not appear in the World Almanac, so information about these colors was probably supplied by Cotrell & Leonard from their client records.
The Commission’s list of college colors represents the first attempt by the IBAC to create a record of hood linings used by American colleges and universities, but unfortunately the list does not identify which institutions on the list had actually applied to the IBAC for a hood lining assignment, nor does it describe the heraldic patterns the Intercollegiate Bureau used to divide the colors within those hoods. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to assume that the Bureau assigned hood lining designs to the clients of Cotrell & Leonard in the Commission’s list as early as 1895 or within a few years after that.
The College of Charleston appears in the Commission’s list but not in the 1894 World Almanac, which means Cotrell & Leonard probably supplied information about this college to the Commission. But the College of Charleston is cited as having blue and white colors in the Living Church Quarterly, which is erroneous. Perhaps blue was accidentally substituted for maroon. In any case, since Charleston was a client of that firm, the Intercollegiate Bureau is likely to have registered a hood lining pattern for the college c.1895-96. The first complete IBAC description of Charleston’s hood does not appear until 1927, where it has the correct school colors of maroon and white. But to avoid duplication with the hood lining already assigned to Lafayette College (maroon with a white chevron), the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume assigned Charleston a hood lining that was “maroon above white”, divided per chevron. This hood lining description does not change in later IBAC lists.