Asheville High School

About this property

Asheville High School is a public high school located in Asheville, North Carolina, United States and is one of two secondary schools in the Asheville City Schools system. Designed by Douglas Ellington, construction of the original building began in 1927 and was completed two years later. The modern addition was built in 1970 and a new cafeteria was finished in 2006. There is a second school located at the same address; the School of Inquiry and Life Sciences at Asheville (SILSA). After the railroad system reached Asheville in 1881, the population of the city grew from 2,000 to 10,000. In response to this population influx, Asheville began a public school system in 1888, which originally consisted of a high school and three elementary schools. The elementary schools were the Orange Street School (currently occupied by NC DOT offices), Queen Carson Elementary School (currently occupied by a bus garage) and Montford Avenue School (replaced by the current William Randolph Elementary in the early 1950s). The high school was located at the corner of Broadway and Woodfin Street, in what had been the private home of Nicholas Woodfin. After use for educational purposes ceased about 1923 this structure was the downtown YMCA until a new structure was built further east on Woodfin about 1970, and the old building torn down. The former high school campus is currently occupied by a bank. The City of Asheville built two structures in the early 1920s, Hall Fletcher in West Asheville and David Millard, on Oak Street, adjacent to First Baptist Church, which, together, were known as Asheville High School. The David Millard Campus occupied a portion of the grounds of a former girls' school, with the balance of the former school grounds covered by the Church. Athletic teams and extracurricular clubs were drawn from both campuses. The former site of David Millard is currently covered by One Oak Plaza and the extension of Charlotte Street, and the West Asheville campus is currently occupied by a new Hall Fletcher Elementary School. The current University of North Carolina at Asheville began in 1927 as a two-year college, known as Asheville-Biltmore College, using classrooms on the ground floor of David Millard. The population of Asheville continued to grow in the late 1920s. By 1926 the school board agreed that "a large, central high school plant" was needed. A committee formed to locate a suitable location reported that it found "only one site within the City of sufficient size, and of reasonable price … this tract of land lies between Victoria Road and the new McDowell Street." Out of seven architects submitting proposals for the new high school, Douglas D. Ellington was selected by majority vote. In addition Nickolaus Louis Englehardt of Columbia University was hired as an advisor to the architect. Englehardt had worked a great deal in school planning and design on a national level. Ellington and Englehardt's collaboration made the new Asheville High a model facility in terms of architecture and educational offerings. The former Asheville High School was renamed David Millard Junior High School and, together with Hall Fletcher, served as the city's junior high schools for a time.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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