Roswell High School (Georgia) - History

History

Roswell High School first opened in 1949 and is the second oldest high school in Fulton County north of the Chattahoochee River. Like the city of Roswell, the school bears the name of Roswell King. King founded the cotton mill that would eventually be the economic backbone of Roswell for much of its early history. The immediate predecessor to Roswell High School was the Roswell Public School on Mimosa Boulevard, which housed grades 1–10 and opened in the 1892 after the Georgia General Assembly passed Act No. 51 on December 20, 1892, which allowed the city to elect a school board and levy taxes for support of the school. Students from outside the city limits were required to pay tuition. In 1896, the city council and mayor were authorized by the state to issue $5,000 in bonds to build a new school building.

In 1914, the existing school was torn down and two new structures were built for the school. Since schools were segregated at that time, a two-story brick building was constructed on Mimosa Boulevard to house the white students in grades 1 through 10, and a one-room wooden building for the black students was built on Pleasant Hill Avenue for grades 1 through 7. The Pleasant Hill facility also served as a meeting place for a local lodge and the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church until the church built its own facility across the street in 1922. Grade 11 was added in the 1920s to the Mimosa Boulevard school. Black students that progressed past grade 7 could then attend Washington High School in Atlanta.

During the Great Depression, the city of Roswell was annexed into Fulton County from Cobb County as part of its 1932 combination with Milton County and Campbell County. Roswell students in grades ten and eleven were then sent to Milton High School in Alpharetta or North Fulton High School in Atlanta to finish their secondary education (which ended upon completion of grade 11). In 1949, the Mimosa Boulevard building was demolished, and a new school was built on the existing site to allow the 10th and 11th grades to return to Roswell as the inaugural Roswell High School. G.W. Adams was the first principal and oversaw the addition of more rooms to the school over the next few years. During this growth, the Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist churches also located on Mimosa Boulevard were used to house auxiliary classrooms. Also in 1949, the high school began participating in athletics with a varsity basketball team and other senior high school extracurricular activities. In 1950, Roswell High School added grade 12 as part of state-wide standard for high schools and played its first varsity football season. The first graduating class graduated in the spring of 1951.

Construction began nearby on Alpharetta Highway near the present day Roswell City Hall on a new high school campus. That facility opened in the fall of 1954 and allowed the high school (grades 8–12) to physically separate from the elementary school (grades 1–7). Roswell High's second campus was designed by the architecture firm Stevens & Wilkinson, which innovated school designs and utilized a "finger plan" to improve functionality of the school. It had a capacity of 400 students and had facilities for industrial arts, shop, music halls, science labs, art room, indoor gymnasium, athletic fields, football stadium and a track. The primary school remained in the Mimosa Boulevard building as Roswell Elementary. As of 2007, the brick elementary building is part of an expanded structure still owned by the Fulton County School System, and it houses the Crossroads Second Chance North Alternative School and the Teaching Museum North. Roswell High remained in the Alpharetta Highway campus until the fall of 1990 when the current campus on King Road was opened.