Mercer University
Georgia
1833
Apocryphally, the orange and black colors for Mercer University were selected by members of the administration and faculty who admired Princeton, but in actual fact nothing is known about how and when this happened. A 31 January 1892 newspaper article in the Atlanta Constitution about the first football game between Mercer and the University of Georgia stated that Mercer’s colors were yellow and black, and the World Almanac said that in 1893 and 1894 Mercer used a single color of “buff”. By 1895 the colors were orange and black.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): buff (1895); orange/black (1896-1935)
The 2 May 1910 edition of a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute newsletter called The Polytechnic included an article about the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume, which the institute had recently adopted. The article appears to be a summary of a c.1910 pamphlet published by the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), which was a reprint of a newspaper article originally written for the 27 July 1902 Argus from Albany, NY. The article in The Polytechnic included a short list of academic hood linings that had been assigned by the Intercollegiate Bureau, partially copied from the IBAC pamphlet. However, seven colleges and universities cited in The Polytechnic were not listed in the Bureau’s pamphlet. These seven institutions were listed with school colors, but not with the heraldic divisions used to separate the colors – unlike the institutions copied from the IBAC pamphlet. This discrepancy suggests that the information about these seven institutions was added by the editors of The Polytechnic and was not from the IBAC.
Mercer University was listed in The Polytechnic with the colors orange and black without describing whether the second color was a chevron, or if the colors were divided per chevron, or something else. The Intercollegiate Bureau had already assigned Princeton an orange hood lining with a black chevron in 1895. So a different pattern would have been necessary to distinguish the hoods from these two institutions using the same school colors.
The first IBAC description of Mercer’s hood lining is from 1927, where it was described as orange with two black chevrons, a description repeated in 1948 and 1972 Intercollegiate Bureau lists. This, however, would have duplicated the hood lining of Jamestown College in North Dakota. So, apparently due to a lack of space, the 1927, 1948, and 1972 IBAC lists used descriptions that were simplified (and thus imprecise) and did not clarify the orientation of the two chevrons in the hood lining. This explains why a more detailed list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) and a 1969 IBAC list accurately described Mercer’s hood lining as orange with two reversed (inverted) black chevrons.