Randolph-Macon College

Virginia

1830

randolph macon seal
randolph macon
official hood lining pattern
lemon
black

Historical details about the adoption of the lemon and black school colors at Randolph-Macon College are uncertain. One source states that students at Randolph-Macon College selected lemon and black as their school colors at some point before 1893, but the World Almanac indicates the college’s original colors of black and orange were used until the turn of the century.

Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): black/orange (1895-1896); lemon/black (1897); orange/black (1900); black/lemon (1902-1914); black/yellow (1915); black/lemon (1916-1918); lemon/black (1923-1931); yellow/black (1934-1935)

A felt pennant from the 1920s.
A Randolph-Macon College football lithograph from 1910.
A varsity sweater monogram from the 1940s, similar to the one in the 1910 lithograph above.
A photograph from a c.1905 Cotrell & Leonard catalogue that illustrated a doctoral hood with a lining that used this type of heraldic pattern.

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 Actually, most of Haycraft’s American hood information was out of date (from c.1912) or inaccurate, derived from a chart of college colors in the 1909 and 1910 editions of the World Almanac, with the first color in this chart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 are listed differently in those sources. So apparently Haycraft was given a partial list of college and university hoods from the Intercollegiate Bureau and he supplemented that list with additional schools from the 1909 or 1910 World Almanac.

Randolph-Macon College was 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 have been from information he received from the Bureau around 1912. Haycraft described Randolph-Macon’s hood lining as lemon with a black chevron. The first definitive IBAC description of the college’s hood was from 1927; here it was identically described as lemon with a black chevron, a description that did not change in any Intercollegiate Bureau thereafter.