Hampden-Sydney College
Virginia
1776
Hampden-Sydney students adopted garnet and gray in 1892, but royal purple and gray had been previously associated with the university since the Revolutionary War. The royal purple and gray colors of the college were derived from the uniforms worn by the student militia during the war, who fought at Williamsburg and Petersburg wearing gray pants and dark purple tunics dyed from the juice of pokeberries. Vintage Hampden-Sydney tobacco cards, silks, pennants, and other souvenirs from the early 1900s display school colors of garnet (dark red) and a light to medium shade of gray.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): silver gray/garnet (1895-1916); garnet/gray (1917-1935)
The chapter on American academic hoods in the 1923 edition of The Degrees and Hoods of the World’s Colleges and Universities by Frank Haycraft included a description of the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume and a long list of schools, each with a description of its hood lining. The chapter was written in a way that implied that this list is from the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC). Actually, most of Haycraft’s American hood information was out of date (from c.1912) or inaccurate, derived from a chart of college colors in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, with the first color in this chart interpreted by Haycraft to indicate the lining color of the school’s hood and the second color in the chart interpreted to indicate the chevron color of the school’s hood. That said, some of the schools in Haycraft’s book did not appear in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac or were listed differently in those sources. So apparently Haycraft was given a partial list of college and university hoods from the Intercollegiate Bureau and he supplemented that list with additional schools from the 1909 or 1910 World Almanac.
Hampden-Sydney is an example of an institution that did not appear in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, which suggests that the college’s hood lining description cited by Haycraft might be from information he received from the IBAC around 1912. Haycraft described Hampden-Sydney’s hood lining as garnet with a gray chevron. The first definitive Intercollegiate Bureau description of the college’s hood is from 1927; here it was similarly described as garnet with a silver gray chevron. “Silver gray” was a term the Bureau used to describe a light shade of gray, which appeared silvery when tailored using satin fabric in the hood lining. This Intercollegiate Bureau hood lining description did not change thereafter.