Name-a-Day Calendar, September 23: UNC Asheville Bulldogs
Page 321 of 365
Chosen in: c. 1937
Chosen by: Unknown
The state of North Carolina does a really good job of archiving its higher education publications. Their DigitalNC program houses just about everything I could ever need—student newspapers, yearbooks, regular ol’ history books—in researching Name-a-Day pages on schools in the Old North State. If something’s not on DigitalNC, it’s probably been lost to the sands of time.
Sure enough, the University of North Carolina at Asheville has all of those resources and more readily available online and none of them had anything on the origin of their “Bulldogs” nickname, so it’s likely we’ll never know.
This is probably at least in part because UNC Asheville was originally a small junior college, and small junior colleges just aren’t as well archived as big state universities. It was founded in 1927 as Buncombe County Junior College, then merged with the College of the City of Asheville to become Biltmore Junior College in 1930 (then Biltmore College in 1934, then Asheville-Biltmore College in 1936).
Intercollegiate athletics are as old as the school itself, as a now-long-defunct football program dates back to the inaugural 1927-28 school year. All UNC Asheville’s website says about the “Bulldogs” nickname is that it has been in place “since the 1930s”, which is accurate but not precise. Not that I can blame them given the lack of resources available from the school’s early years.
I can pinpoint it a little further using what exists. Their student newspaper, called The Highlander at the time,1 has just three known issues available for the entire decade. The first is from April 1, 1935: no mention of bulldogs. The second is from December 6, 1937, and does use the nickname. That’s not quite enough to say for sure whether it was adopted between those two dates, but we can at least say for certain it existed by 1937.
The first available edition of the school yearbook, The Summit, is from 1939, but publication took half a decade off after 1941 because of that whole World War II thing and the book didn’t mention the “Bulldogs” at all until the first postwar issue, published in 1947. A timeline, published by their library, of important university events makes no mention of a bulldog until a live one was acquired to serve as the school mascot on November 6, 1948. Neither does a written history entitled The University of North Carolina at Asheville: The First Sixty Years penned by Dr. William Edward Highsmith, a man so important to the university that the student union is named after him to this day.
I get the feeling I’ve exhausted every resource here. C’est la vie.
Asheville-Biltmore College became a four-year school in 1963 and was renamed the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 1969. Their current mascot is a costumed bulldog named Rocky.
Previous page: UMBC Retrievers
Next page: UNC Greensboro Spartans
Find every page at the Name-a-Day Calendar hub!
Now known as The Banner Blue