Maplewood Richmond Heights High School - Maple Leaves Yearbook (Maplewood, MO)

Page 11 text:

Q-V. ict with three directors to a village school district ith six directors. The new board decided to tablish what was then termed tlu'ee ward schools one at Valley, one at the north end and another t the south end of the district. 330,000.00 was oted for the purpose of purchasing two school ites and erecting and equipping a four room brick building on each site. Thus the East Richmond and the Sutton schools came into existence. These schools were opened to pupils in November 1906. Miss Clara Wilder was the first superintend- entg Miss Anna Jennings, first principal of Val- leyg Miss Anita Bohnsack, first principal of East Richmondg Miss Julia Brossard, first principal of Sutton. The pupils finishing the eighth grade who wanted a high school education had to pay tuition in St. Louis and other districts, so in 1907 the board established the first high school with Corne- lia Brossard in charge of all classes. This high school was started in a one story frame building to the rear of the eight room frame building at the .V . .-...A t ...W - 4. W... , ,-,,. .,4r...,...-. - ?.-A -Q... 1.9-.-. .L ,y - ,,,,. ,i , . ,- . baht The first Maplewood High School Building. Valley School. This building had been built for the overflow of third grade pupils before Sutton and East Richmond Schools were built. An urgent need for a second teacher was soon brought to the board's attention, and a partition was erected in this one frame building, and it became a two' teacher high school in 1908. Wil- liam Robertson replaced Miss Clara Wilder as Superintendent in 1908. In 1909, a 345,000.00 bond issue was voted. The two story frame building at Valley was razed and a brick addition with laboratory on the third lfloor was built onto the brick building erected in 1901. Domestic Science fnow Home Economicsj, Manual Training, Music and Art were started. With this program the Maplewood District became one of the first in St. Louis County to offer a High School Program. Until 1909 there was no provision for education of Negro children in the comnnmity. In that year the board rented the building on Dale Avenue, which is now the Church of the Living God, as a Negro school.

Page 10 text:

OUR SCHOOL 1907- 1976 Nearly 157 years ago, in 1819, a young man twenty-one years of age, James L. Sutton, Jr., made his way out from New Jersey to St. Louis to help his older brother in his blacksmith shop at Second and Spruce Streets. Seven years later he had saved enough money to buy a 134 acre farm five or six miles southwest of St. Louis. It was part of a three square mile Spanish land grant bought from the heirs of Charles Gratiot for "a dollar and a bit" per acre. Ten years later he bought another 54 acres, this time paying 57.50 per acre. St. Louis was growing. In the 1830's he moved with his wife and child to a log cabin on the farm. As his children came of school age, he gave an acre of ground for a school house on the Man- chester Road six miles from the St. Louis Court- house near McCausland Avenue. This was the beginning of the Maplewood- Richmond Heights School District. It was called the Washington Institute when it opened in 1840. Later it was known as the Benton Station School. After the first steam locomotive west of the Mis- sissippi River had made its historic five mile run from the Fourteenth Street Station to Chelten- ham Station in ten minutes in the year 1852, Ben- ton Station was soon opened a mile west of Chel- tenham, at the site of the school on Manchester Road. The school nearby was given in time, also the name of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a trus- tee of the St. Louis public school lands and cham- pion of free public education as well as of an intercontinental railroad. This early school district was Township 6, Dis- trict 4. It was three times larger than the size o the present Maplewood-Richmond Height School District. Its limits included a part of th Webster Groves District on the south and south west, a large portion of the City of St. Louis an extended as far north as Clayton Road. Most of i lay within Sutton's farm, as did the City o Maplewood, founded later. The present Maplewood-Richmond Height district boundaries were defined when the City 0 St. Louis seceded from the County in 1877 James Sutton, Jr., who had served on the schoo board for the old district of Township 6, District from 1869, was instrumental in organizing th School District of Maplewood and became Presi dent of the first school board for this county are serving until 1908. During Mr. Sutton's time two story frame building, which stood in th woods west of Big Bend Road and probably o Comfort Avenue, was rented as the first school. School was opened in February of 1877. The school directors purchased the old Valle School site and erected a one room building, which was opened in 1888. Another room was added in 1889. The school became known as the Bartold Valley School, the name later bein shortened to the Valley School. In 1892 these two rooms were replaced by an eight room two story frame building, and one of the two first rooms was moved to 7553 Woodland Avenue. 1901 saw the first brick building - a four room addition in front of the eight frame rooms at Valley School. The fast growing community held an election in March, 1906, and changed from a rural school dis-

Page 12 text:

1925 Orchestra 1930 Orchestra 1930 M-RH Band