Lebanon Valley College
Pennsylvania
1866
Information about the history of the navy blue and white school colors of Lebanon Valley College is not available at this time. A 1949 book by Henry L. Snyder entitled Our College Colors inaccurately stated that the Lebanon Valley’s colors were “royal blue” and white, but one must remember that “royal blue” traditionally described a dark shade of blue similar to navy.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/white (1904-1912); navy blue/white (1923-1931); blue/white (1934-1935)
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 is written in a way that implied that this list was 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 Actually, most of Haycraft’s American hood information was out of date (from c.1912) or inaccurate, derived from a chart of college colors in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, with the first color in this chart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 IBAC, which he supplemented with additional schools from the 1909 or 1910 World Almanac.
Lebanon Valley College is an example of an institution with a description in Haycraft that is different from its description in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, which suggests that the college’s hood lining cited by Haycraft might have been from information he received from the IBAC around 1912. Haycraft described Lebanon Valley’s hood lining as blue with a white chevron.
The first definitive Intercollegiate Bureau description of the college’s hood was from 1927; here it is described as Yale blue with a white zone. The IBAC typically used “Yale blue” to describe a dark shade of blue, and “zone” was the way the IBAC described a heraldic bar. In this instance the bar was used to distinguish Lebanon Valley’s hood lining from the hood the Bureau had already assigned to Pennsylvania State University (navy blue with a white chevron) no later than 1905.