Charleston High School
(When it was new)
Content on this page was contributed by Sara Levy Ellin. She bought it on eBay and contributed it to her classmates. Thank you, Sarah!
Click the pictures to enlarge
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Front view, from Washington Street East |
Rear view, from Lee Street East |
The "arches" at the main entrance to the school |
The auditorium, where many assemblies were held |
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Actually, they had pretty good food at the cafeteria |
How many of you remember the book store? |
Shhhh ... this is the library |
The gymnasium |
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One of the classrooms |
Lower Level Floor Plan |
1st Level Floor Plan |
2nd Level Floor Plan |
The following was taken from the School Board Journal, November 1926:
The Senior High School of Charleston, West Virginia, was planned to meet the needs of 1600 high school pupils. Its exterior is buff brick trimmed in Indiana limestone. The floors of halls, cafeteria, and toilets are of terrazzo. The walls of the shops are painted with white enamel paint, the halls and ceiling with ivory-colored paint, and the sidewalls of the classrooms with tan-colored paint. The lower borders of the halls to a height of five feet are finished with light yellow gazed brick on one side, and French gray-colored recessed lockers on the other. The dimensions of the building are 223 feet by 273 feet.
The total number of rooms in the building is sixty. Practically all classrooms have blackboards on three sides. All blackboards have a top, one and a half foot cork display border and the blackboard nearest the door has a side, one and a half foot cork bulletin board.
Each department has its own office conveniently located and equipped with cabinets for a professional library, desks, tables, chairs, and toilet facilities. The classrooms and shops of each department are grouped for convenience.
On the Lee Street side of the ground floor are found the rooms for teaching domestic science, domestic art, table service, and household chemistry. Immediately across the hall to the north are the cafeteria, kitchen, pantry, storage room for household arts department, storage room and office for cafeteria, dish-washing room, and a cafeteria accommodating 800 pupils. The refrigerators are equipped with mechanical refrigeration.
The manual arts department occupies the east and west sides of the ground floor. Here are taught printing, mechanical drawing, sheet metal, plumbing and electrical repairing, auto mechanics and auto machine shop work, bench and lathe work, wood finishing and cabinet making.
The commercial department occupies the Washington Street side. Its range of subjects covers bookkeeping, stenography and typewriting, model office practice, commercial geography, commercial law, and the supervision and management of the high school bookstore.
The first floor includes the principal's office, health room, boys' gymnasium (70 feet x 90 feet), girls' gymnasium (40 feet x 60 feet), auditorium with a seating capacity of 2004 and a stage with a seating capacity of 400. To the rear of the stage is a stage equipment room 11 feet x 35 feet. The anterooms to the stage are classrooms. The balcony of each gymnasium is adequate to accommodate the usual crowd of spectators at the games. For the accommodation of larger crowds at inter0city games between boys' and girls' high school teams, the boys' gymnasium may be used and enough additional temporary seats have been placed under the balcony and at the north end of the boys' gymnasium floor to seat 1200 spectators.
Te Washington Street entrance leads into an attractive lobby, 16 feet x 27 feet, finished in white plaster and Tennessee marble wainscoting. The two openings at the heads of the stairways leading to the first floor, and the two openings on the first floor between these two are beautifully arched, giving the lobby a proper setting for the entire building.
The Lee Street side of the building on the first floor has a large room for the teaching of freehand drawing and six classrooms for the teaching of English. On the west side are found the library, a library office and repair room, a library instruction room, and a study hall. The Washington Street side of this floor is set aside for the history department classrooms and office. Since the English and history departments require the frequent use of the library, they are placed nearest to it.
The auditorium is the largest in the city, and serves the community for the holding of large assemblies. The Civic Music Association will utilize it for bringing to the music lovers of Charleston some of the leading musical artists of the world. Other civic bodies will provide worth-while programs.
The second floor has provision for classrooms for public speaking, visual instruction, foreign languages, mathematics, and six classrooms and laboratories for the teaching of biology, physics, and chemistry. These classrooms and laboratories are arranged in pairs, two for each science. The biology laboratory is placed on one of the corners of the building in order to have the advantage of bilateral lighting
Above the Washington Street hall is placed a fireproof moving-picture booth (14 feet x 17 feet). This room is wired to permit the operation of three machines.
The building is nearly fireproof in construction. The floors are either terrazzo of of reinforced concrete, the studding is steel, and even the window frames and sash are steel. The interior finish is kiln-dried Indiana white oak, which adds greatly to the attractiveness of the building.
By erecting the building under its own supervision, the board of education of the Charleston independent school district saved the taxpayers of the city $104,430. The actual cost of the building and equipment was $949,370.
The present enrollment in the Charleston Senior High School is 100. The pupils are supplied by the Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson Junior High Schools and by the surrounding school districts, and its full capacity will probably be utilized within the next six years.
The building was designed by Warne, Tucker and Patteson, Architects, of Charleston, West Virginia.
~ Kanawha County, West Virginia "School Board Journal" November 1926