Oklahoma State University – Stillwater
Oklahoma
1890
Formerly “Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College”
The chevron was by far the most common heraldic division the IBAC employed to divide the two or three colors in an institution’s hood, but beginning in 1895 the “parti per chevron” was also used quite frequently. Here the two school colors were placed in the hood lining one above the other, with the division between them following the shape of a chevron. Later the IBAC began to use a per reversed chevron division and a division per bar on rare occasions. Confusingly, in IBAC lists from 1927 and 1948, a number of hoods were described as “[color] above [color]” or “[color] over [color]”, which referred either to a hood lining divided per chevron, per reversed chevron, or per bar, and today it is not usually known which of these three patterns the IBAC intended to describe.
Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College was cited as having a hood lined “orange above black” in IBAC lists from 1927, 1948, and 1972, but none of these lists described the way the two colors were divided. However, a list compiled by Kevin Sheard in Academic Heraldry in America (1962) and a 1969 IBAC list both described Oklahoma State University’s hood lining as orange with a black chevron. If these were accurate descriptions of a late 1940s or 1950s IBAC revision, the revision would have unfortunately caused Oklahoma State’s hood lining to duplicate the hood lining the IBAC had assigned Princeton University in 1895 (which is no doubt why the IBAC originally assigned Oklahoma A&M a hood lined “orange above black”). So the accuracy of these two sources is questionable, particularly since the IBAC from 1972 reverted to the original “orange above black” description.
Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College students selected orange and black as their school colors in 1899 or 1900 to honor a popular faculty member whose father had graduated from Princeton. The athletic mascot of Princeton, a tiger, was also used by Oklahoma A&M until it was unofficially replaced by “Pistol Pete” (a cowboy) in 1923.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): orange/black (1916-1935)
That said, by the mid 1920s the IBAC was describing the hood linings of two colleges – Oklahoma A&M and Georgetown College in Kentucky – as being “orange above black”, which suggests that one of these institutions used a per chevron division of the colors and the other used a per reversed chevron division or a per bar division. As the second of the two colleges to adopt orange and black, here Oklahoma State has been assigned a per reversed chevron division of the two colors, which also echoes the triangular heraldic device used in the university’s seal.