Following the Civil War until about 1870, many of the students were the young soldiers of the Confederacy, “for it must be remember that they went into the army as young as fifteen years of age.” Following that, the University was attend by students who were almost exclusively the sons of soldiers of the Confederate Army, and then the grandsons of the soldiers. The men that attended the University during this time had little or no money and even less time to waste. Most stayed only a year or two to hastily get a little education, before hurrying home to get to work reconstructing their ruined homes and fortunes.
It was these men who said to one another, “This Great Mother has honored us, and our fathers, and their fathers before them, with rich gifts. From Virginia to Texas we have sucked manhood from Her breasts, and thus Her sons have been trained to die many and glorious deaths in Her defense. Therefore, we can do no better and no more fittingly recognize this, or better show our gratitude and appreciation, than by bestowing upon Her, as Her entitled and endowed colors, the bloody grey uniform of her soldiers.” (Corks and Curls 1914)
“Thus it was that UVA’s colors from 1861 to 1887 were Cardinal Red and Silver Grey, symbolic of the bloody grey of the Confederacy–for all the sons of the South were Hers. The cardinal red and silver grey colors were worn with great enthusiasm” (Corks and Curls 1914). The Rives Boat Club competed in the colors, students sported the colors on the ribbons of their hat bands, and there was even a locally manufactured and well-known brand of cigars called the Silver Greys.
“In the fall of 1888, there was a mass meeting called in old Public Hall, in the annex of the Rotunda, for the purpose of changing the University colors” (Jefferson’s University) Attending the meeting was “Mr. Allen Potts, one of the University’s earliest athletic heroes,” (Jefferson’s University) who ran track, played football and rowed. Allen had spent a summer studying and rowing at Oxford and was wearing a silk handkerchief scarf he earned in a race in which he defeated Grosvenor Rowing Club (editor’s note: silk waist scarves were the betting shirts of the day) or as University publications phrase it ‘Potts obtained the scarf with a lot of boating clothes while at Oxford’. A fellow student grabbed the navy and orange scarf right off of Potts’ neck, where it was “improperly” adorning instead of his waist, waved it high in the air and yelled ‘How will these colors do?’.
The colors of the striped scarf struck the fancy of the crowd and the colors were chosen without opposition. And thus the University colors were changed to navy and orange. Potts framed the handkerchief scarf and it hung in his room, where it stayed, until a fire destroyed the home in 1920.