Chandler High School       1912

The first recorded school in the Chandler area was at the Chandler Ranch in 1907. When the plot for the Chandler town site was prepared in 1911, a large parcel of land at the northeast corner of Cleveland and California Streets was reserved for a school building. When the town site officially opened on May 17, 1912, the building was already under construction.  The school opened with 67 students in September 1912.  “Old Main” is one of two historic structures remaining on the Chandler High School campus still in use today.

.                                                              Happy  100^th Birthday Arizona , February 14, 1912.

Rising high above the town to the East sits this magnificent old building courtesy of the former affluence of a copper mining town.  Harding School, the current ‘bus barn’,  and Roosevelt School preceded  Superior High School. The Superior Panthers – orange and black!   The new Superior Junior/Senior HS (2000)  is located next to Kennedy Elementary on the southwest end of Superior.

Tombstone: Too Tough To Die

by Janice Hendricks

Tombstone Arizona has been titled “The Town Too Tough To Die” and for good reason as many things have worked against this town still standing. A town was formed around the area known as Goose Flats shortly after prospector and scout Ed Schieffelin discovered a wealth of silver in this area around 1877. He had been warned of only finding his ‘tombstone’ while searching for his treasure and thinking this an appropriate name for this new town site the location soon become known as Tombstone, Arizona Territory. Well that word can bring to mind thoughts of death perhaps thinking of the marker set upon a gravesite. Would the name be a premonition of sorts as many similar towns that sprung up over a mine claim had and would die

The late 1880′s and up to the turn of the century found the silver mining industry failing as efforts to remove the seeping water that found its way into each mineshaft failed. Miners were disgruntled and soon found new employment in the copper mines of Bisbee and other new mining towns. Families were moving away and the town was soon becoming its predetermined status, a ghost town. In 1929 a vote brought about yet another major change for this town. Bisbee was now to be the new county seat. All official offices were to be relocated some 25 miles away creating still another link to the town’s preordained eventual death. Was not the name Tombstone becoming more and more appropriate for a dead town?

And yet, many residents continued to stay on here. Homes were still occupied and residents still met at the town hall for the political banter. Flour and coffee as well as other dry goods would have been purchased from the local market perhaps located on Allen Street. The ladies auxiliaries would have met and box lunch socials would have been prepared and anticipated. The town did not die.

Services were needed to carry on a life in Tombstone that could sustain its growing population. Movie theaters, soda fountains, drug stores, dry cleaners, lumber and hardware stores and markets were what occupied the buildings on Allen Street. Tombstone Union High School had been built where once cribs of prostitution occupied the east end of Allen Street. Students from all around Cochise County were educated here and prepared for perhaps college life in the big city of Tempe, Arizona.

http://www.tombstonetimes.com/stories/tootough.html

The town of Gila Bend is situated near an ancient Hohokam village. When Father Eusebio Francisco Kino visited in 1699, the older site along fertile banks of the Gila River had been abandoned by another early tribe called the Opas, who instead used the river to irrigate their crops at a nearby rancheria. This same rancheria was visited by Juan Bautista de Anza, commander of the Presidio at Tubac and founder of the city of San Francisco, and by Father Francisco Tomas Garces in 1774.^[9]

From 1857, Gila Ranch was a stagecoach stop on the San Antonio-San Diego Mail Line and the later more famous Butterfield Overland Mail route to California located 17 miles from Murderer’s Grave Station to the west and 40 miles east of Maricopa Wells Station. Later other stage and freight routes and the railroad converged here. The nickname the “Crossroads of the Southwest” stems from the area having been part of an important transportation route in the settling, development and growth of the Great Southwest. Gila Bend was the “center of a wheel”, with spokes leading in many directions throughout the region.

Bullion Plaza was opened as a grammar school in 1923.

It now houses the Bullion Plaza Cultural Center and Museum.

The main two story-building contains over 20 classrooms and a small theater-auditorium. Bullion is an excellent example of neoclassical architecture reflecting pride and commitment to public education and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It was constructed with lightly reinforced, cast-in-place concrete and plaster exterior walls, wood frame first and second floors and a wood frame roof. Interior walls are typically plaster on wood frame. The foundation consists of continuous spread wall footings and isolated pier footings. The construction methods and materials are typical for structures of this age and type.

Bullion Plaza served as a grammar school from 1923 to 1994 when it was closed because of concern that it had fallen into a state of disrepair making it unsuitable for use as a public school.

Bullion was operated most of its lifetime as the town’s “Mexican” school reflecting the segregation pattern which prevailed in many Arizona communities including the public school system. Bullion was desegregated during the 1950-51 school year and began integrating Anglo students into Bullion Plaza.

During its segregated years, the teaching staff consisted only of Anglo teachers. These teachers uniformly reflected an almost missionary sense of devotion to the students. High academic standards and expectations plus strict discipline were the rule of the day. A system of physical punishment was used on students who would forget the “English only” rule. A trip to the principal’s office where the paddling was administered for speaking Spanish and for other infractions was something the students tried to avoid at all costs in those days.

Loyalty to the school and pride in its history remain characteristic hallmarks of its graduates despite the school’s rigid segregation culture.

During World War II the main lobby was occupied by a booth set up by the students where they would eagerly sell “defense stamps”. The volume of defense stamps sold was reflected by stamps pasted over giant-sized posters of Japan’s leader Tojo and Germany’s Adolph Hitler.

Patriotic competition was generated by students’ efforts at covering up those faces with purchases of defense stamps to help the war effort. During those years graduation night would bring out a large number of the town’s residents to share the excitement of the students and their proud parents. The town’s officials would cooperate by putting up road barriers to close off the street fronting the school from car traffic. Folding chairs would fill the street and the overflow crowds would sit along the curbside to witness the graduation ceremonies that were held on the school’s front steps.

While the classrooms have been slightly modified from the original design, the building remains essentially unchanged. A favorite of former student visitors is the Library Room which still contains a colorful mural painted in the late 1930’s by grammar school students Alice Mendez and “Canuto” Hernandez under the watchful guidance of Librarian and art instructor Miss Amber Yocum.

In 1997 the Town of Miami purchased the school from the school district and committed to using it as a cultural center and museum.

   In 1920 a new Fairbank School was build replacing the original wooden one that had burnt down, the schoolhouse was built of gypsum block manufactured in nearby Douglas, Az.     The school house has been restored and now serves as a museum.

© Kathy Weiser/Legends of America, updated July, 2010

‘

From the desk of  Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Retired

…  My grandfather, Henry Clay Day, established the school near Duncan, Arizona in the 1880′s to have a place to educate his five children after he moved to Arizona in order to run the cattle ranch he had established.  He would bring a teacher from Kansas each year for the school.  Eventually he took in a partner, Sam Foster, to run the ranch and H. C. Day took his family to Pasadena, California.  His oldest son, Courtland Day, went on to the University of Arizona where he captained the first football team for the University.’

The Memorial Hall ( 1922) is one of two remaining structures left on the campus.

Student names are found on many of the bricks of the Memorial Hall.

UNITED  STATES INDUSTRIAL INDIAN SCHOOL
1896-1990
“It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them.”
–Indian Commissioner Thomas Morgan (speaking at the establishment of the Phoenix Indian School)

Founded in 1891, the United States Industrial Indian School at Phoenix, later known as the Phoenix Indian School, was a coeducational, federal institution for American Indian primary and secondary students. The school temporarily operated out of the West End Hotel, but in April 1891 a 160-acre property was acquired with money from both the federal government and a group of Phoenix businessmen, and in June 1892 a main school building was completed. By 1900, enrollment had grown from 42 to 698 students from 23 tribes in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, and Oregon. The campus had 14 brick and 20 frame buildings, including a large schoolhouse, a two-story building containing employee quarters and a student dining hall, a large six-room shop for vocational training, several dormitories, a water and sewer system, a bathhouse, and a boiler house. There were 240 acres of fields, where hay and garden crops (turnips, cabbages, tomatoes, and melons) were cultivated. Horses, mules, cattle, pigs, ducks, turkeys, and chickens were raised to contribute to the vocational education of the students and the school’s self-sufficiency.
A multitude of rules controlled every aspect of daily life. Military discipline was imposed, with boys and girls organized into army like units and drilled in elaborate marching routines (a practice that continued into the 1930s).
As the school’s original name indicates, one of its primary goals was to train Indian youth in productive trades. Young men worked and learned in a variety of shops on campus (wagon making, shoemaking, harness making, blacksmithing, carpentry, tin working, cabinetmaking ), as well as in the school’s bakery and on its farm, which included a dairy. The education of girls focused on training for the household (sewing, cooking, and laundry).
Pupils were required to attend Sunday school and services off campus and to perform church-related service. Students who did not attend church were punished. In 1934, religious freedom was established and compulsory attendance of religious services was eliminated in 1934 according to federal policy, but in practice punishment for not attending church continued through the 1960s.
As the government built more reservation schools, the value of Phoenix Indian School land became greater than the benefits of running the school. An act of Congress, signed by President Reagan in November 1988, closed the school and passed its administration from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the National Park Service.
The final class of 19 students was graduated in 1990.

© 1998 by the Archaeological Institute of America
www.archaeology.org/online/features/phoenix/

http://www.scottsdalecvb.com/includes/media/docs/HistoricWalkingTour1.pdf

Gilbert’s ‘new’ school was built at the southwest corner of Elliot and Gilbert Roads in 1913; the ‘Alamo’, as the building was nicknamed, housed Gilbert Elementary School for more than 60 years before it was abandoned for classroom use in 1977.

When the Elementary School was built at the southwest corner of Elliot and Gilbert Roads in 1913, the Gilbert School District was formed. Students would often hitch a ride to school on a farm wagon heading to the new creamery that was built in 1911!  Beats the big yellow school bus doesn’t it?

In 1977 the “Alamo”, as the building was nicknamed, was abandoned for classroom use; in 1982 it reopened as the home of Gilbert’s history museum.

Preserving a Gilbert landmark

When the school closed, the old building seemed to be the ideal location for the Gilbert Historical Museum. In 1979 the Gilbert Historical Society was incorporated as a non-profit corporation, and in June 1980 the school building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The old elementary school building had been a Gilbert landmark for generations, and preserving an element of life dear to the community as well as providing a home for the town’s rich history seemed a perfect match. On May 15, 1982 the building reopened its doors to the public as the Gilbert Historical Museum; the Society owns the building thanks to the generosity of Otto and Edna Neely.