History
Prior to the opening of the school, students attended the nearby Miller School. Ground was broken for the original school building in 1926 with representatives from each of the four entering grades participating. The senior class president was George E. Sarkozy, one of those that participated in the ceremony. The school was designed by architect Everett Lane Williams of the Detroit architectural firm Van Leyen, Schilling & Keough. The school building cost at $2.2M and was inspired in part by the buildings of the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, Michigan as well as the Rushton and Apethore halls in Northamptonshire, England.
The exterior of Fordson is made of granite and uses Briar Hill sandstone trim. The library has hand carved oak paneling, a fireplace, painted wall murals by Zoltan Sepeshy, tapestries and Jacobean fumed-oak furnishings and many bronze and marble statues including, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Nike, Niobe, Venus, and Mercury. The main entrance has ten busts that include philosophers, playwrights, and mathematicians like Plato, Aristedes, Sophocles, Homer, Demosthenes, Aesculapius, Euripedes, Pindar, Archimedes, and Socrates. The main hall also includes a blue and gold Fordson Tractor with lettering of state champions imprinted on its top. The building features architectural sculpture by Corrado Parducci. Fordson's architecture was represented in the 1987 film, The Rosary Murders when the library and tower were displayed. The school also became recognized as a Michigan Historical Site in 1998.
Read more about this topic: Fordson High School
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)