Why is purple the Williams color?
The story goes that at the Williams-Harvard baseball game in 1869, spectators, watching from carriages, had trouble telling the teams apart (there were no uniforms) so one of the onlookers bought ribbons from a nearby millinery store to pin on Williams’ players. The only color available was purple. The buyer was Jennie Jerome (later Winston Churchill’s mother) whose family summered in Williamstown.
