Central High School - Red and Black Yearbook (St Louis, MO)

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. f:.i..... N-f..,,,-. , , ., ..,. .1 .,. I., ik, . swarms-MW 4,.L, g,,.. , : ..., L , , . , ,., ' . 'WT' I xi ,i I The Spirit of St. Louis over Eads Bridge Lindbergh Welcomed Home from Havana by 100,000 School Children, Feb. 14, 1928 Sixteen Central in session, By the mighty Mississippi

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do l79.Nl7'kll7'Qil I THE RED AND BLACK, THE FIRST PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER By J. S. GOCHENAUER, Department of History ,,Q,, T was an important event in the history of secondary A x education in the United States when the St. Louis High School was opened on February ll, IS53. It is now ' N Lx seventy-five years since this school, the oldest secondary Lxm, school west of the Mississippi River supported entirely from public taxation, was first established in the Benton School at Sixth and Locust Streets in St. Louis under the principalship of Jeremiah D. Low, A. M. ln view of the magnitude that high school education has since assumed in the trans-Mississippi region of the United States, which is not far from two-thirds of the area of our entire country, the celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of an event of such far-reaching consequences should receive the attention that its place in our history of education deserves. ln investigating the primacy in point of age of the St. Louis Central High School among public secondary schools in this vast region, it is obvious that extensive areas may be practically omitted in the discussion since very much of this western country remained until long after 1853 either wholly the roam- ing ground of Indians, or else, if a few white men had already entered here and there, they had at the date in question only sparsely settled stations. For example, the whole region from the Rocky Mountains westward, with the exception of California and Oregon, had but a slight white population before IS53, and public secondary education could, of course, not have been estab- lished there until long after the date mentioned. In the portion of the trans- Mississippi country east of the Rocky Mountains, a similar statement would hold true if we eliminate for special consideration the tier of states stretching from Minnesota to Louisiana and Texas, and lying immediately west of the Great River. On the single question of the origins of public high schools in the entire area west of the Mississippi River it has been found necessary, there- fore, to examine only the history of the school systems in the states of California and Oregon west of the Rocky Mountains, and in the states of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, lowa, and Minnesota, all lying between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. ln preparation for the present article regarding the origins of high schools, letters were addressed to the state superintendents of public instruction in all the states mentioned in the foregoing paragraph. The replies in several cases Eighteen