This is the official coat-of-arms of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute. (API was renamed as Auburn University in 1960, though it had casually been referred to as Auburn by everyone for decades.)

This is a one-off, and so I wonder how "official" it is. (It was designed by a member of The Glom's art staff, John Spearman, a junior studying commercial art, from Birmingham.)

It is always amusing to see these older publications move between the 1856 (or 1857 or 1859) and 1872 founding dates. The 1872 above the eagle head refers to the year the school officially adopted the Agricultural and Mechanical College name. (Auburn is, in fact, the fourth name of the campus.) It started as East Alabama Male College, a Methodist school. Then came the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama when the state took control of the school, in 1872, under the Morrill Act. It was the state's first land-grant university. API was the name from 1899 to 1960, and it has, of course, been Auburn ever since.

Spearman was the son of a steel man. He was born in 1912 and died in central Alabama in 1987. He married and buried his first wife, and then married again in his late 60s. He's buried in Hoover, in a cemetery I drove by regularly for years and years.

While there isn't a lot on his coat-of-arms, I thought I'd find more about him, but alas.

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