Starting at the beginning, whenever that was

"The student voice of Washington State University since 1986."

This was the motto beneath the Evergreen flag when I first started working as an editor in the summer of 2006. Simple, noble, straight to the point – a pretty nice motto, I suppose. Except that it was wrong.

The first issue of the Evergreen came out in March 1895. Washington Agricultural College (known as W.A.C.) had about a dozen faculty members and no more than 200 students. The only building on campus still standing today was Thompson Hall.

So yeah, it was a long time ago, and a difference of one year isn't all that long in the course of a century. But that one year is the difference between being correct and being wrong about our history, which is why it matters to me.

I figured out the error that summer when looking through the first Chinook yearbook (appearing in 1899, just a few years after the paper). I double-checked against the first issue of the Evergreen on microfilm in the library, and it was corrected to 1895 for the first fall issue in 2006. (Click on my crude little infographic to check out the actual difference in the Evergreen flag.)

It makes me wonder when the "voice of the students" motto was first used, and why the first person to type in "1896" got it wrong. Is it listed incorrectly somewhere else? Too lazy to check the original source? A simple typo that slipped into the template? Perhaps I'll stumble across the answer as I go along.