Dartmouth College

New Hampshire

1769

dartmouth seal
dark green
original hood lining pattern
green

Dartmouth chose green as its school color in 1866. This often described as a dark shade of green in various late 19th and early 20th century sources, including the World Almanac.

Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): green (1895); dark green (1896-1899); green (1900-1910); dark green (1911-1913); green (1914-1916); Dartmouth green (1917-1918); dark green (1923-1931); green (1934-1935)

Dartmouth hood LLD 1936
A 1936 Doctor of Laws hood from Dartmouth College in the College of William & Mary archives.
A 1907 postcard from the "New England College Series".

In 1896 Dartmouth College became one of the first institutions to adopt the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume, according to information from the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) in the 1897 Living Church Quarterly (published in December 1896).

At this point the Intercollegiate Bureau probably assigned Dartmouth a green hood lining, which was how the college’s hood was described in the list from the Bureau published in the 27 July 1902 edition of The Argus, an Albany NY newspaper, which included a list of IBAC hood lining patterns that had been assigned to some of the more prestigious colleges and universities of the time. But by the middle of the 1920s the Intercollegiate Bureau began to more precisely describe the hood lining as “dark green”.