The "Education In The City Of Lancaster" Story

J.P. McCaskey High School as it was in 1940 and today.

It was an ordinary day.  Checking out my mom's high school yearbook which I happened to come across while sorting through cardboard boxes that I plan to discard.  

I made an altered Polaroid print of J.P. McCaskey High School.

Not sure what to do with the yearbook, but it's tough to downsize if everything I pick up I decide I can't part with.  Anyway, my mom graduated in 1940 from J.P. McCaskey High School in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  Her class was only the second to graduate from the high school on the east side of the city.  John Piersol McCaskey High School opened on May, 1938, accepting Lancaster city's first gender-integrated class of students.  

The original Boys' High School in Lancaster.

The school was named for John McCaskey, a local educator, musical composer, and politician.  J.P. McCaskey High School looks the same today as it did back when it opened with the original Art Deco facade, lobby, and auditorium.  For years I heard the story of my dad dating just about every girl in mom's class and she was the only one left to date.  Their marriage lasted a lifetime for both of them.  My dad graduated in mid-1938 from what was known at the time as Boys' High School.  The original Boys' High School was erected in 1874 on Orange Street in the center of Lancaster and for more than 40 years was the center of high school education in Lancaster for both boys and girls with girls being taught on the first floor and the boys on the second floor.  

The school quickly became over- crowded so in 1902 Lancaster's most famous architect, C. Emlen Urban, was hired to design a new school which was supposed to be an all-girls school on nearby Charlotte Street.  

Stevens School on Charlotte Street was built for girls.
This photo is from an old postcard.

By 1905 a new school building, known as Stevens High School was opened just for girls.  It was built using three architec- tural styles: beaux-arts, Italian Renaissance and Greek Classical.  It was built of purple brownstone and golden bricks using elaborate terra cotta ornamentation and green copper cresting with a hand covered chestnut entrance way.  

Photo of Stevens I recently took.  This is now an apartment
building.  Across the top of the building is the name of it.

The third floor had a 600-seat auditorium with chandeliers and was equipped with typewriters and wireless telegraph.  Many residents of Lancaster were appalled with the extrava- gance used in the school.  When it first opened boys began attending classes there as well due to overcrowding at the Boys' High School.  In 1911 it was decided that Urban would design another school to take the place of the original Boys' High School.  

The new Boys' High School on West Orange Street.  Today
it is known as Robert Fulton Elementary School.

That opened in 1918 and all boys were moved into that new school.  That school was built where the old school was located on West Orange Street.  The new boys' high school later became an elementary school when J.P. McCaskey opened.  The Boys' High School is now Fulton Elementary School while the  Stevens High School for girls was later renamed Thaddeus Stevens Elementary School and remained that until 1983 when it became an apartment building.  

Front of Robert Fulton Elementary School in Lancaster, PA.

My dad's graduating class was one of the last classes to graduate from Boys' High School, while my mom was one of the first to graduate from the new J.P. McCaskey High School.  Today the city school district has four Middle Schools that feed students into McCaskey High School.  A few alternative schools also exist to help educate the multi-cutural and racial population in the city school district.  Quite a bit different than when both my mom and dad graduated from high school in the city of Lancaster.  It was another extraordinary in the life of an ordinary guy.