George Washington University
Washington DC
1821
Formerly “Columbian University”
The original colors of Columbian University were orange and blue, but when Columbian became George Washington University in 1904 the college colors were changed to buff and blue, the colors of the uniform the general wore during the Revolutionary War. Judging from vintage tobacco cards, silks, pennants, and other collegiate memorabilia, George Washington University used a dark shade of blue.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): orange/blue (1895-1904); buff/blue (1906-1935)
Until his death in 1921, Gardner Cotrell Leonard was the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC) and a partner in the firm of Cotrell & Leonard, an academic costume manufacturer and the depository for the records of the IBAC. If one assumes that a college or university was assigned a hood lining pattern by the IBAC when academic costume was ordered from Cotrell & Leonard, client lists for Cotrell & Leonard can help one estimate the approximate date that lining pattern was approved by the IBAC.
The first time Columbian University appeared in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement was in the 1897 “Ole Miss” of The University of Mississippi yearbook, which suggests an IBAC hood assignment for the university in 1896 or 1897. The advertisement did not describe the colors or heraldic pattern of Columbian’s hood lining, but according to the list of college colors provided by the Intercollegiate Commission of Academic Costume to the 1896 Living Church Quarterly, Columbian’s hood must have been lined with its school colors of orange and blue.
After Columbian became George Washington University in 1904, the IBAC would have reassigned the university a hood lining with its new school colors. Under its new name and colors George Washington was first cited in a 1910 IBAC list as having a blue lining with a buff chevron, perhaps employing – if Columbian’s hood was blue with an orange chevron – a simple substitution of George Washington’s buff color for Columbian’s orange.
Unfortunately, George Washington’s 1910 IBAC assignment was a duplication of the hood that had already been assigned to Hamilton College between 1895 and 1898 (when Columbian’s colors were still orange and blue). To correct this mistake, the IBAC may have briefly reassigned George Washington a hood lined buff with a blue chevron, as this is the description in a c.1912 IBAC list. But by 1918 the IBAC was describing the colors of George Washington’s hood lining as “dark blue” and buff, and by 1969 as “navy blue” and buff, in both cases more accurately describing the actual shade of the university’s blue.