by Wesley Harris
“Firmly Founded Alma Mater,
Mother True is She.
Here beneath her towering columns,
Pledge we loyalty.”
A Facebook user posted recently that he had asked artificial intelligence (AI) to tell him when Ruston High School began playing football. He received a response that the school started in 1921 but had played football since 1905.
Sometimes AI doesn’t know everything. Sometimes it isn’t real intelligent.
His post started a social media discussion of the correct date for the beginning of the school and the start of the football program.
Those dates are difficult to determine.
So when was Ruston High “firmed founded”? The answer is a little more complicated than looking up when the first building was constructed.
Wikipedia, an encyclopedia-type website that isn’t always accurate, says the school started in 1921.
A history of the school on its alumni association’s website says the institution existed “prior to 1911” without giving an exact date.
Ruston High went only to the 8th grade in 1918 and did not extend to the 11th grade until 1921, the year it appears the first formal graduation was held. That probably explains the 1921 date found on some internet sites.
Finding the real answer means looking back at the history of early education in Ruston.
In 1883, Ruston began to grow out of former cotton fields as the Vicksburg, Shreveport & Pacific Railroad built its way across north Louisiana. While trains crisscrossed Mississippi and even Texas, the only railroad in northern Louisiana at the time was a short line from Vicksburg to Monroe.
The Civil War interrupted and bankrupted that line and nearly two decades passed after the war before a new company, the V. S. & P., completed its route across north Louisiana. New towns popped up along the line, including Ruston, while other small towns missed by the railroad faded away.
Ruston rose on land owned by Robert E. Russ, hence the name of the new town. Russ gave land for a courthouse, Baptist and Methodist churches, and a cemetery.
Russ also provided a block for a school. This block, bordered by Trenton Street, Georgia Avenue, Monroe Street, and Florida Avenue, is now home to City Hall and the Civic Center.
Ruston’s first schools were private ones. Harmolean Grambling Simmons ran a school close to the railroad tracks where the fire station, farmer’s market, and old power plant are located—also a plot donated by Russ. Previous keepers of Ruston history consider this the first school (1884) in the new town.
The passing trains were a constant distraction to Miss Simmons’s young students. Older students attended an academy or college located in the school block donated by Russ.
A Baptist minister, William Christopher Friley, operated the Ruston Male & Female Academy beginning in 1885, a year after Ruston’s incorporation as a town. The name of the school soon changed to Ruston College and a two-story wooden building was constructed in the Trenton Street school block facing West Georgia Avenue.
By 1889, Ruston College boasted 275 students. The term “college” is a bit misleading since colleges of that time usually included what today would be high school-aged students. Today, Ruston College would be considered a combination grade school—high school—junior college.
As Louisiana Industrial Institute, the first name for Tech, came into being in 1894, Ruston College closed in favor of the state-supported public school. Reverend Friley moved on to take the presidency of Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene and later, Louisiana College in Pineville. His son Charles, likely a Ruston College student, became one of the longest serving presidents of Iowa State University.
Considered a forerunner of Louisiana Tech, Ruston College can also be considered a precursor to Ruston High. After the college closed, the Lincoln Parish School Board used the building as Ruston’s public school, starting about 1896. By 1911, the building was no longer sufficient as Ruston’s only white public school. A bond election was held in 1911 to pass a 3 ½ mill tax to construct a multi-story brick building called “Ruston Public School.”
The old Ruston College building was demolished to build Ruston Public School which housed grades 1-6. Grades 7-8 were added in the 1915-16 school year. When Hallie Townsend became principal in 1918, the 9th grade was added with a total of 482 elementary students and 104 high schoolers.
By the 1922-23 school year, 508 students studied under ten teachers in grades 1-7 and 328 in grades 8-11 under nine teachers. The school became so crowded, a temporary wooden building called “The Doghouse” was erected at the corner of Trenton Street and Florida Avenue.
A $175,000 bond election in 1922 allowed the school board to plan two new (and white) elementary schools, renovate Ruston Public School into a proper high school, and a brick school building for black students.
The new brick building constructed in 1924 on Oakdale Street for black students became known as Washington Heights School. Before that, in Ruston’s early days, black students attended schools in space provided by churches. In 1891, the private Ruston Normal Colored School was formed on West Line Avenue, a site now occupied by the Neighborhood Walmart. Even when black public schools were constructed, they were leaps and bounds behind white schools until integration in the 1960-70s when all-black schools were closed. Ruston High was fully integrated in the fall of 1970 when Lincoln High were incorporated into the school.
The 1911 Ruston Public School was known as Ruston High School in 1924 after the departure of the elementary students to the completed Hillcrest and Eastland Schools. A third floor of the school was finished out and the building served as a high school until the “new” high school was completed on Cooktown Road (now Bearcat Drive) in 1939. The old high school then served as a junior high for a time.
The 12th grade was not added to Ruston High until the 1949-50 school year. The Art Deco-styled building has seen numerous additions to double its size.
So take your pick on the year Ruston High was started—1884, 1896, 1911, 1924. You can make a case for each of them.
