Cornell, Dartmouth, Hamilton, Harvard, Princeton, Wesleyan, Williams, and Yale competed in the national championship.
An enduring athletic legend says that the
College got its color at the national championship regatta on Saratoga Lake in 1875.
According to the story, crews from Union and Harvard showed up for the regatta wearing the same color. They immediately disputed each other's choice, the story goes, and by the time the arguing stopped, Union had switched to garnet and Harvard had chosen crimson. (A variation on the story has the two teams racing to choose their colors.)
The real story is a little more complicated.
The Harvard crew began wearing crimson handkerchiefs in 1858, but Harvard's first baseball team, in 1863, sported a magenta “H,” apparently deciding that the color was more fashionable. Its crew switched to magenta in 1864, and in 1873, when the student newspaper began, it was called
The Magenta.
Union came to its color officially in 1866, when a committee of three members of each undergraduate class met to select a college color. They chose magenta, and the College's first intercollegiate team, baseball, soon began to wear magenta-trimmed uniforms.
So, if not exactly a dead heat, close enough to say that Union and Harvard came to magenta at about the same time.
In 1875, Union was admitted to the Rowing Association of American Colleges. Recognizing that the two institutions claimed the same color, and wanting to avoid confusion at the regatta, a Union student named Andrew Van Vranken Raymond (later president of the College) sent a letter to Harvard saying that magenta rightfully belonged to Union.
The letter, of course, stirred things up at Harvard. But when alumni pointed out that Harvard had used crimson as early as 1858-and when an alumnus admitted that he had bought magenta headwear for the crew in 1864 only because he could not find crimson-the color turned. The student newspaper immediately changed its name to
The Crimson and editorialized that magenta “is not, and never has been, the right color for Harvard.”
Meanwhile, the people at Union, perhaps recognizing that they were not going to have an easy time in the dispute, relinquished their claim and selected garnet as the College's racing color.
All of which still doesn't settle what, exactly, constitutes “garnet” or “crimson.” The ink used on official Union documents is the same color that Lafayette uses for its “maroon” and Colgate uses for its “red.” And the debate at Harvard went on until the early 1990s, when a university committee finally selected the “official” crimson.