What the heck is an Aggie? The history of mascots at Utah State University
Utah State University, founded in 1888, was a result of the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant College Act, which allowed land to be issued to states for the purpose of creating institutions of higher education.
Schools developed from the land grant acts were often full of farmers and other local people needed some way to distinguish themselves.
“Most of the land-grant schools were known as the Aggies. It was just the short way for saying agriculturalist,” said Bob Parsons, a university archivist. “As schools started getting bigger and more different, they looked for ways to differentiate themselves.”
Schools began to take on new names in conjunction with Aggie. The Wyoming Cowboys, the Oregon State Beavers and the University of Nevada, Reno Wolf Pack are just a few that followed.
Utah State didn’t start to make any of those transitions until later. “Utah State wasn’t really known as anything,” Parsons said.
The university has undergone a great deal of mascot change.
The following are two names that proceeded our Aggie title.
1940’s to the 1950s – The Farmers.
From the late 40s and early 50s, Utah State began to make a transition. Football announcers to introduce the school as the Aggies or the Farmers.
The first real mascot to grace the cover was an elderly farmer wearing bib overalls and chewing on a hay seed.
Regardless of the newly featured mascot, it still didn’t have a large role on campus.
“You didn’t have what we see today,” Parsons said. “There wasn’t some guy out there dressed up like a farmer. No one ran around in a suit.”
The farmers image lasted for almost a decade until the 60s when Big Blue came along.
1960s to early 1970s – The Highlanders?
Big Blue, a bull, was selected to represent the school as the mascot. During this time, the university experienced incredible growth and many looked towards the mascot as a way to represent that future.
“What I would hope for this university,” President Glen L. Taggart said in his inaugural address, “is that it would become widely known as a place where great teaching is emphasized and where a student, working within an intellectual environment, may come to know the marvelous victories that can come from the free mind alone,”
During the 1969-70 school year, a coalition was formed among the Student Senate and the Stater’s Council, called “The Forward USU Forum,” which existed to find a new and representative mascot for the school.
In an eight-page notification of their findings, they presented changing the mascot from the Farmers to the Utah State University Highlanders. Their reasons for picking such a mascot dwelt around the idea that “too many people still refer to the university as the Agricultural College.”
The efforts of the forum resulted in a resounding failure and backlash for the mascot change.
“They pushed too hard. If they would have presented one of those warriors from ‘Braveheart’ it might have been a go, but it looked so effeminate,” Parsons said. “There was a tremendous backlash against changing the mascot.”
Janet McKinnon, a graduate of Utah State, remembered what it was like when the changes were going on.
“I graduated in 1965. The school was really trying to make the change from the farm boys to something more sophisticated,” Janet said.
Through the efforts of the Forward USU Forum, Utah State became and remains know as the Aggies.
-nebutler@cc.usu.edu
(Statesman file photo)