Huntsville High School

The Huntsville High School building was a historic educational facility located on Baker Highway in Huntsville, Tennessee, the county seat of Scott County. Constructed between 1931 and 1932, the building was an irregularly shaped two-story brick structure that served as the primary school for Huntsville and the surrounding community for nearly four decades. On July 2, 1987, the 1932 Huntsville High School building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior and the Tennessee Historical Commission in recognition of the educational and architectural significance the facility plays in the Scott County community.

Location and Setting

The school was situated on a fairly large campus located at the base of the mountains in Huntsville, on Baker Highway. Other buildings on the property included a stone cafeteria built in 1940, a circa 1960 building constructed by the Trades and Industries Department, and a concrete block maintenance building constructed in 1986. 

Educational Predecessor: The Huntsville Presbyterian Academy

Before the establishment of a public high school, secondary education in Huntsville was anchored by a church-founded institution. The forerunner of Huntsville High School was the Huntsville Presbyterian Academy, a white frame two-story building located on a knoll overlooking the town of Huntsville. This landmark was erected in 1884 and destroyed by fire in 1928.

Since many of the first settlers on the Cumberland Plateau were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, it was the aim of the Presbyterian Board of Missions to establish a church and school in every county seat. Highly educated ministers and teachers dedicated their lives to the spread of religion and learning in the backwoods sections of East Tennessee.

The Presbyterian Academy was the first school of secondary education in the county. Its teachers all held college degrees and could confer college degrees through the Academy. Courses offered included English Composition, Literature, Latin, Greek, Philosophy, Algebra, Geometry, Botany, and Theology. During 1905, statistics showed more students attending the Huntsville Academy than any other like school in East Tennessee, with 175 pupils, four teachers, and the minister-principal. 

History of the Public School

Founding and Early Years (1908–1929)

The Huntsville High School was established in 1908 by the state legislature. A wooden frame building was erected on the site purchased for school purposes near the Town of Huntsville. The original school had four classrooms and housed both the high school and elementary grades. Initially, there were approximately 125 students, 25 of them in high school. 

In 1917 more rooms were added to the original building and a large co-educational dormitory was constructed in order to accommodate more students in a planned effort to make Huntsville High School a fully accredited four-year high school. In 1921, under the supervision of Principal C. W. Wright, who oversaw the change from a two-year to a four-year program, the first students to complete the four-year course of study graduated. 

In the early years the school functioned as an independent school under a special act of the Tennessee General Assembly, but after several years was taken over by the Scott County School System. In 1929, a wooden frame gymnasium with a dome roof was built near the school, bringing sports inside along with an area for square dances and many other school activities.

Construction of the New Building (1931–1932)

On February 5, 1931, the Tennessee Legislature passed bills and Governor Horton signed them into law authorizing the construction of a new elementary and high school, at a cost not to exceed $75,000, to replace the old frame building which was “entirely inadequate to care for the high school as it should be taken care of.” A Huntsville High School Building Board was established to plan and carry out the new facility’s construction.

The board hired Clem H. Meyer, an architect from Knoxville who had designed several other schools and public institutions, to design the school. The contracting firm of Cook and Elliot was hired to build the structure. The new school building was completed in the summer of 1932 and was put into service in the fall of the same year.

The dedication was held on September 9, 1932. At the time, local press described the new facility as “the best building of its kind in any town the size of Huntsville in the entire state and not surpassed in the large cities for beauty, modern construction and arrangement.”

Architecture

The Huntsville High School was a two-story brick building. The high school was constructed of light brown, rough-textured brick with cream-colored brick used as a decorative accent to outline the window sills, window spandrels, the string course above the second-story windows, the segmentally arched secondary entrances, water table, and roof coping. The brick pattern used on the school was a five-row common bond, with a variety of decorative brick patterns on the window spandrels and on the pilasters.

Although the building was fairly plain in ornamentation, the central entrance reflected the Collegiate Gothic Revival style, a style that was extremely popular in academic buildings of the early 20th century. The building had an irregularly shaped flat-based V-plan configuration with an attached rectangular-shaped auditorium in the center of the open space formed by the V. Two later additions were connected to either end of the building by small corridors.

The building had a beautiful auditorium, one of only two in Scott County. 

Consolidation and Repurposing

The facility served Huntsville and the surrounding rural community as both elementary and high school until 1971, when the new comprehensive central high school was completed. In 1971, the county’s new consolidated high school — Scott High School — opened in Helenwood, and high schools in Huntsville, Norma, and Robbins all closed their doors.

In the 1970s, as the Middle School Movement began to gain momentum around the country, Scott County school officials decided to convert the high school into a middle school. In 1996, a new building was constructed on the same site as the old building.

Legacy and Significance

The Huntsville Elementary and High School Campus played a significant role in most families in the area for 60 years. It remains one of the sturdiest and most well-built buildings in Scott County. Among the school’s most distinguished alumni was Howard H. Baker Jr., a native of Huntsville who went on to serve as a United States Senator from Tennessee, Senate Majority Leader, and White House Chief of Staff under President Ronald Reagan.

The building’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places recognized both its architectural merit as a fine regional example of Collegiate Gothic Revival design and its central role in the educational and social life of Scott County across much of the 20th century.