Henagar Junior High recently celebrated its 100-year milestone with a reception and tour of the school commemorating this joyous occasion. Many alums attended the event and spent the evening walking the halls and reminiscing about years past. Those attending ranged in age from the most recent graduating class to as far back as the graduating class of 1947. Classmates met in the lunchroom following their tour for refreshments while Skip Wilson shared a timeline of the school’s history.
Even though a small public school had been located in Henagar since 1901, the Junior High School as we know it today didn’t come into existence until 1922. The original school building, which was located in the area where the Willow Tree store now stands, was torn down in 1921, and a new building was built in the current location of the school on land purchased from Mr. Henry Bell. In May of 1922, the County Board of Education gave the city a junior high school “provided the people of Henagar maintain an accredited junior high school for nine months, meet state requirements, and the community was to support the school for the first part of the term. The County Board was to maintain it for the latter part of the term.”
This new junior high school building was a big improvement over the original school, featuring ten classrooms and an auditorium. This building was a two-story wooden structure with a wooden shingle roof. Water was pumped from a nearby well, and it had a spacious playground area. Free labor was used to construct the building, but some aid was received from the State Department of Education.
On a snowy day in January of 1940, in the early part of the afternoon, the Henagar Junior High School building caught fire from one of the second-floor heaters. The principal, Boston Massey, discovered the fire immediately, and the students were marched out in quiet order. The only injury was to a 16-year-old boy, Glenn Hunter, who suffered a lacerated hand and sprained arm when he was forced to leap through a window to escape a collapsing ceiling as he tried to save desks and books from the blaze. School continued in local churches and store buildings for the next two years until a new school could be built.
Henagar’s present school building was constructed of concrete blocks by the Works Progress Administration. It had aerial navigation markings on the roof, as was the custom of the time for large buildings. The new school was opened in the fall of 1943 and featured twelve classrooms, an auditorium, and a lunchroom in the basement. In 1974, a new lunchroom was constructed behind the school and was connected to the school with a walkway. This lunchroom was expanded in 2007.
In 1976, under a new state program, ninth grades in junior high schools were transferred to senior high schools, and thus HJH lost its ninth grade. In the Fall of 1977, the first Kindergarten in DeKalb County was added to the school, becoming a K-8 school as it stands today. A new gymnasium and additional classrooms were built in 2001, and an Outdoor Classroom was added in 2022.
Henagar Junior High takes pride in the legacy it has built and the impact that it continues to have on educating students and involving the community. Henagar School has always been its own tight-knit family, and within the walls of our small school, every student is involved, every student is included, and every student is encouraged to chase their dreams. These values will continue into the next century and beyond.
