Elmira College
New York
1855
The senior class of Elmira College chose purple and gold as the school colors in 1871. The purple and gold iris was also chosen as the college flower.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): purple/gold (1895-1935)
Cotrell & Leonard was a 19th century academic costume manufacturing firm that supplied caps, gowns, and hoods to most of the prestigious colleges and universities in the US. Gardner Cotrell Leonard, one of the partners in this firm, was Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), an organization founded in 1887 to compile data on European and American academic costume. Leonard was also a consultant to the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume, which on 16 May 1895 approved a voluntary system of academic costume that quickly became the standard followed by most American colleges and universities.
Two years before the Intercollegiate Code was created, Leonard wrote an article called “The Cap and Gown in America” for the December 1893 issue of The University Magazine. In this article, Leonard described various types of caps and gown currently used by American colleges and universities and encouraged more schools to adopt academic costume. He also mentioned several institutions that used cap and gown; these were no doubt clients of the Cotrell & Leonard firm where he worked. So when the 1895 Intercollegiate Code was authorized and the IBAC began assigning hood lining patterns for each college or university that adopted the Code, clients of Cotrell & Leonard would probably have been some of the first to have had hood lining patterns assigned to them.
Elmira College is mentioned in “The Cap and Gown in America” as having adopted academic costume, so the Intercollegiate Bureau is likely to have assigned a hood lining pattern to the college in 1895 or soon after. Elmira is also included in a list of college colors the Intercollegiate Commission appended to the copy of the 1895 Intercollegiate Code they sent to the editor of the 1896 Living Church Quarterly (published in December 1895). So if the IBAC did not assign a hood lining color arrangement to the college in 1895 or 1896, a lining design may have been registered after the Bureau was chartered for this purpose by the New York Board of Regents in 1902. But Elmira’s colors and the arrangement of those colors in the lining of the hood are not definitively cited until a 1927 IBAC list that describes the college’s hood as “gold above purple”.
The Bureau used the “color above color” phrase to describe hood linings with colors heraldically divided either per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar, with per chevron being most common. This Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume description of Elmira’s hood lining pattern does not change in any list thereafter.