Cornell 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 Cornell College by 1904 at the latest, particularly since use of the college’s academic costume was mentioned in the Record of the Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of Cornell College (1904). But no description of the college’s hood was given in either source.

The first definitive and complete IBAC description of Cornell College’s hood lining was in 1927 where it was stated to be purple (not royal purple) with three white chevrons. This hood assignment might be from a few years earlier – the 27 July 1902 edition of The Argus, an Albany NY newspaper, states that the IBAC was assigning three chevrons to some schools by 1902; perhaps Cornell College was an example. At any rate, this hood description for Cornell College remained unchanged in all subsequent IBAC lists.

The IBAC assigned Cornell College a purple lining with three white chevrons because Amherst College had been assigned a purple lining with one white chevron and Pennsylvania College for Women (today Chatham University) had been assigned two. One should note that by 1927 the IBAC rarely used “royal purple” in its new hood lining assignments, and had changed almost all of the earlier “royal purple” hood descriptions to “purple”. So today it is difficult to know if a particular college or university had been assigned a hood lining with a dark or medium shade of purple.

Here Cornell College’s correct royal purple color has been used.