Williams College
New York
1793
Royal purple became the school color of Williams College in 1865. “Royal purple” is a dark shade of purple.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): royal purple (1895-1935)
Neither of these sources described the color or colors of Williams’s hood lining. But first in a list of college colors supplied by the Intercollegiate Commission on Academic Costume to the 1896 Living Church Almanac and then in the 27 July 1902 edition of The Argus, an Albany NY newspaper that contained a list of Intercollegiate Bureau hood lining patterns that had been assigned to some of the more prestigious colleges and universities of the time, the IBAC described the hood for Williams College as having a (single color) royal purple lining.
Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC), was an 1887 graduate of Williams College. The IBAC assigned a hood to Williams in 1895 or 1896, as the college was cited as a client of Cotrell & Leonard (the depository for the IBAC) in an advertisement in the second volume of a photographic album entitled Souvenir of the University of Michigan (1896). Williams was also mentioned in an editorial in volume 23 (number 4) of The Tuftonian (January 1897) which stated that the Code “is now recognized and in use by Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, University of the City of New York, Lafayette, Catholic University of America, University of Chicago, Williams, Dartmouth, Union, Bellevue Medical, Jefferson Medical, Rush Medical, and in part by Harvard.”
However, after Leonard’s death in 1921 the Bureau changed almost all of its earlier “royal purple” hood lining descriptions to “purple”. The citations for Williams College were likewise changed to “purple” in subsequent IBAC lists.
The original dark shade of the college’s royal purple has been retained here.