Roanoke College
Virginia
1842
Roanoke College was an early client of academic costume manufacturer Cotrell & Leonard, as it appeared in a list of college colors appended to the copy of the 1895 Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume the Intercollegiate Commission sent to the 1896 Living Church Quarterly (published in December 1895) but not in the 1894 World Almanac, which was the source of most of the college colors the Commission compiled for that appendix. In the Cotrell & Leonard information in the Living Church Quarterly, Roanoke was cited as having a dark blue and steel gray hood lining, but the heraldic division of those colors was not described in that list. Likewise, 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 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 Actually, most of Haycraft’s American hood information was out of date (from c.1912) or inaccurate, derived from a chart of college colors in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, with the first color in this chart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.
Originally the colors of Roanoke College were blue and gray, but students adopted “national blue” and “Mandarin yellow” as their new school colors around 1899. In 1907 national blue and Mandarin yellow baseball uniforms were unavailable, so the college ordered jerseys, sweaters, and socks in maroon and gray, a color combination still used by all Roanoke athletic teams today. But national blue and Mandarin yellow remain the official college colors. “National blue” is a synonym for the dark blue in the canton of the US flag, and Mandarin yellow is a golden yellow or orangish-yellow hue.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): maroon/gray (1923-1931); national blue/mandarin (1934-1935)
Roanoke 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. The college had adopted new school colors in 1899, so Haycraft described Roanoke’s hood lining as Mandarin yellow with a blue chevron. The first definitive IBAC description of the college’s hood was from 1927; here it was similarly described as gold yellow (a yellow-orange) with a navy blue chevron. By 1969 the IBAC was describing the hood lining as Mandarin yellow with a national blue chevron. Essentially the three 20th century hood lining descriptions by the IBAC are identical, as Mandarin yellow is a golden yellow and national blue is a dark blue.