Emory and Henry College
Virginia
1836
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/orange (1895); lemon/blue (1923-1935)
Academic hood lists published by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) in 1927 and 1948 described Emory & Henry College as having a hood lined blue with a lemon yellow chevron, which suggests an IBAC assignment prior to 1916. The college must have sent the Bureau a fabric sample with a slightly lighter shade of Emory & Henry’s dark blue, as the Bureau typically used “blue” to describe a medium shade of blue.
A list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) described the college’s hood lining as gold with a blue chevron – a description with interchanged colors similar to a 1972 IBAC list that described a hood lined lemon with a blue chevron.
Here the original pre-1916 Intercollegiate Bureau lining assignment (with traditional blue and yellow school colors) has been retained.
Emory & Henry College’s colors were traditionally blue and yellow. The college’s shade of blue was consistently dark, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries both dark (or “orange”) and bright (or “lemon”) shades of yellow were used. The Emory & Henry alma mater was composed and adopted by the class of 1916; here the school’s colors were described as “blue and gold”, which is a description that has remained consistent since then. (One should recall that “yellow” and “gold” are heraldically synonymous.) Initially the shade of gold was bright, but this has mellowed over the years to a warmer shade of gold.
