Colorado State University
Colorado
1870
Formerly “Colorado Agricultural College” and “Colorado A&M University”
In 1893, prior to the first football season played at Colorado Agricultural College, the team and other students voted to adopt green and orange as the college’s colors. Apparently these two colors were chosen to symbolize alfalfa and squash (sometimes cited as alfalfa and pumpkin), which was perhaps an appropriate choice for an agricultural school. The college’s green color ranged between a dark shade like hunter green and a medium shade like grass green, whereas the shade of orange varied between a saturated, robust orange and a lighter, golden-yellow orange.
The lighter shade of Colorado Agricultural College’s orange was often called “gold” and began to appear as an alternative to orange around 1909. By the time Henry L Snyder wrote Our College Colors in 1949 the colors of Colorado A&M were usually being described as “green and gold” but the shade of what was called “gold” continued to vary between yellow and orange; it was rarely a metallic gold color.
Today Colorado State University describes its colors as “forest green” and “Vegas gold”.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): green/gold (1911-1912); yellow/green (1913); green/gold (1914-1935)
Colorado Agricultural College must have sent the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) color samples that were dark green and light orange, because hood lining pattern lists from the Bureau in 1927, 1948, and 1972 described the college as having a light orange hood lining with an olive green chevron. The IBAC used “olive green” to describe a dark shade of this color, so the Bureau’s hood lining arrangement seems to have been a fairly good representation of the early dark green and yellowish orange colors of the college.
A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the hood lining of Colorado A&M as pumpkin yellow with an alfalfa green chevron, which are agriculturally poetic descriptions of orange-yellow and a medium shade of green.
Finally, a 1969 Intercollegiate Bureau list said that Colorado State University used a golden yellow hood lining with an emerald green chevron. All of these citations generally describe the same shades of yellowish orange, but the dark green chevron of the 1920s seems to have been lightened and brightened in the 1960s. This was not an accurate depiction of the college’s traditional dark green, which may be why the 1972 Intercollegiate Bureau list reverted to the original IBAC description of light orange with an olive green chevron, which are the shades that have been used here.