Fort Wayne High School — Central High School

1864 – 1971

Founded: The origin year is genuinely in conflict, and the record prints the conflict rather than a settled year. The Indiana Historical Society's sketch of the school's own archive gives 1864, when Fort Wayne High School opened on East Wayne Street as the city's only public high school, and the school's own 1914 Caldron yearbook illustrates fifty years, 1864 to 1914. The History Center's post on the first diplomas gives 1857, with a class of 1866 among the first graduates, and its pennant record gives 1867 for the first free public high school. The three readings may mark the start of instruction, the formal organization the school itself used, and a free-school milestone; no source states that reconciliation, so the dates stand side by side.

The East Wayne years: The first building stood on East Wayne Street between Calhoun and Clinton. In March 1878 the school board, forced by hostile moves in the state legislature, renamed the school Central Grammar School, and the East Wayne building carried that name in the directories of 1889 to 1892, with Chester T. Lane as principal, the same Lane whose junior high would shelter Snider's first classes three generations later. The name High School was restored in 1900. The fate of the East Wayne building is not established in the sources for this record.

The Barr Street building: In the fall of 1904 the school moved to 1200 South Barr Street as Fort Wayne High and Manual Training High School, with about 480 students and 17 teachers. The site, part of the old Allen Hamilton homestead, was bought from Margaret V. Hamilton for $25,000. The building is a limestone Beaux Arts design by Charles R. Weatherhogg, among the works ARCH Fort Wayne counts as his most renowned in the city. Fort Wayne Community Schools' own academy history gives 1902 for the building's opening; the Historical Society, the History Center and the inscription on the site marker all give 1904, and 1904 is carried here. Boys' and girls' gyms were added in 1930, and a Clinton Street addition in 1939, which required razing the neighboring Hamilton family home.

Course: In 1922, when South Side opened and the school was no longer the city's only public high school, it took the positional name Central High School. The Tigers, in royal blue and white, won the boys' basketball state championship in 1942-43, finishing 27-1 under Murray Mendenhall and beating Lebanon 45-40 in the final; Central was also state runner-up in 1936, to Frankfort, and in 1946, to Anderson. After the war, as families left the central city, Central shrank, about 1,300 students in 1959 and 927 in 1968, while becoming the school most of the city's Black students attended: 85.1 percent of Black high school students were at Central by 1949, the school was about half Black in 1964 and 56 percent Black in 1968.

Fate: The school board closed Central in 1971 as its desegregation move, a board decision under sustained pressure from the Black community to end de facto segregation in the city high schools, not a federal court order. Attendance lines were redrawn across the city, Wayne and Northrop high schools opened the same year, and Black students fanned out from the school where they had been the majority to schools where they were a small minority. By its closing, enrollment was barely 700. The building was not demolished; its life after 1971 is the Anthis entry, next. The building still keeps a Tiger Den, a room of Central yearbook image boards and memorabilia maintained by the Central High School Alumni Association.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Society, Fort Wayne Central High School photographs and ephemera (M 1376), historical sketch: the 1864 opening, the 1904 move, the 1922 renaming, the gyms and the 1939 addition, the 1971 closing.
2. The History Center: the 1857 diploma account and the 1867 pennant record, the two variant origin dates.
3. South Side Totem yearbook history, 1935: the Central Grammar School years and the Barr Street purchase.
4. Randy Harter, Fort Wayne Reader, 2017, and ARCH Fort Wayne: the Weatherhogg building and the Hamilton homestead.
5. News-Sentinel, Leo Morris, Era of Crises: the enrollment decline, the racial composition and the closing.
6. Iwan W. Morgan, Indiana Magazine of History (1999): 85.1 percent of Black high school students at Central by 1949.
7. Indiana High School Athletic Association, Boys Basketball Records Book: the 1943 title and the 1936 and 1946 runner-up finishes.