Georgetown University
Washington DC
1789
In 1876 the Georgetown College Boat Club appointed a committee on colors to select college colors for the team. They chose blue and gray, the colors of the Union and Confederate uniforms during the War Between the States, to symbolize the restoration of the United States as students from both the North and the South returned to the college. The shade of blue was dark.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/gray (1895-1935)
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.
Georgetown University first appeared in a Cotrell & Leonard advertisement in the 1897 “Ole Miss” of The University of Mississippi yearbook and the Georgetown College Journal, Volume 26, Number 1 (October 1897), which suggests an IBAC hood assignment for the university in 1896 or 1897. The advertisements did not describe the colors or heraldic pattern of Georgetown’s hood lining, but the university’s hood is cited in the 27 July 1902 edition of The Argus, an Albany NY newspaper, which contained a list of IBAC hood lining patterns that had been assigned to some of the more prestigious colleges and universities of the time. Here Georgetown’s hood lining was described as gray with a blue chevron. By 1927 the color shades were more precisely defined as “silver gray” and “navy blue”.
“Silver gray” was a term the IBAC used to describe a light shade of gray, which appeared silvery when tailored using satin fabric in the hood lining, so a 1969 IBAC list removed the confusing “silver” from the hood description and returned the description back to “gray” and navy blue – more accurately describing the colors of the Union and Confederate uniforms that inspired the school colors of Georgetown.
The gray shade of Confederate uniforms varied considerably: early war uniforms were “cadet” gray, a light to medium shade, but during the middle and late years of the war Confederate uniforms were tailored from imported British fabric in a dark shade of gray. Georgetown typically used a medium shade of gray.