Marietta College
Ohio
1835
Marietta College selected navy blue and white as its school colors in 1895, having previously used red, white, and blue as its colors.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): blue/white (1896-1897); navy blue/white (1900-1935)
On 16 May 1895, the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume approved a uniform system of academic costume for American colleges and universities called the “Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume”. The Intercollegiate Code stipulated that the college color or colors of the institution granting the degree would be used in the lining of the institution’s hood but did not define how multiple colors would be combined in the hood lining. One of the advisors to the Commission was Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), an organization affiliated with the academic costume manufacturing firm Cotrell & Leonard. Since 1887 the IBAC had maintained a database of information about academic regalia in the US and Europe, so the Commission entrusted the Intercollegiate Bureau with the responsibility of assigning a unique hood lining design to every college and university that chose to adopt the Intercollegiate Code.
The Commission sent a copy of the Intercollegiate Code along with a list of schools and their colors to the Living Church Quarterly, which included this information in its 1896 edition (published in December 1895). The list of college colors the Commission appended to the Intercollegiate Code was largely copied from the 1894 World Almanac. But some colleges and universities in the Commission’s list do not appear in the World Almanac, so information about these colors was probably supplied by Cotrell & Leonard from their client records. The Commission’s list of college colors represented the first attempt by the Intercollegiate Bureau to create a record of hood linings used by American colleges and universities, but unfortunately the list did not identify which institutions on the list had actually applied to the IBAC for a hood lining assignment, nor did it describe the heraldic patterns the IBAC used to divide the colors within those hoods. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to assume that the IBAC assigned hood lining designs to the clients of Cotrell & Leonard in the Commission’s list as early as 1895 or within a few years after that.
The “dark blue and white” colors of Marietta College appear in the Commission’s list but not in the 1894 World Almanac, which means Cotrell & Leonard probably supplied this color information to the Commission. And since Marietta was a client of that firm, the IBAC is likely to have registered a hood lining pattern for the college c.1895-96. It is unknown what hood lining design the IBAC assigned Marietta, because there were many other schools with identical or similar colors in the Committee’s list including Barnard College (blue and white), Butler University (blue and white), the College of Charleston (erroneously listed as blue and white), Columbia University (blue and white), Franklin & Marshall College (blue and white), Hillsdale College (navy blue and white), Illinois College (white and blue), Manhattan College (erroneously listed as blue and white), Pennsylvania State College (navy blue and white), Seton Hall College (blue and white), the University of North Carolina (white and blue), and Vincennes University (white and navy blue).
The first complete Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume description of Marietta’s hood did not appear until 1927, where it was stated to have a white lining with a navy blue chevron. By the early 1970s Marietta may have been using a navy blue hood lining with a white chevron of a slightly greater width (four inches) than normal (which was three inches), but this late revision is not to be preferred to the original IBAC assignment, which was unique to Marietta College.