Palm Beach Art Hight Schools Palm Beach Art High Schools

M.Thousand. Cloutier Special to the Daily News

Many Palm Beachers came of age "on The Loma."

Information technology was where book-learning, sports and first kisses unfolded at Palm Beach County'southward showtime high school, which debuted 110 years ago.

But whether or non you attended Palm Beach High Schoolhouse, which thrived for decades near today's Kravis Center, it still echoes.

More Palm Beach history

Simply ask Reginald G. "Reg" Stambaugh, an chaser, Palm Beach Day School alumnus and historic preservationist whose late father, resident and borough leader Dr. Reginald J. Stambaugh, graduated from Palm Embankment Loftier in 1947.

"Palm Beach High School helped shape his hereafter, not just academically simply also from the principles he learned from his football game coach," Stambaugh said earlier this calendar week. "That the school was located on the highest indicate in the area says a lot about how important education was in the community. The school played an important role in everyone's lives."

For more than 60 years, Palm Embankment High School graduated students who became everything from motion picture stars and university presidents, to Florida Supreme Court justices, acclaimed scientists and religious leaders.

The school in 1970 was merged with another and renamed; later information technology closed. Its historic edifice is now part of the Dreyfoos School of the Arts.

School had wide draw

Though Palm Beach High, which dates to 1909, was in West Palm Beach at Hibiscus and Sapodilla streets, many of its students hailed from Palm Beach.

That was the case from the beginning: Subsequently a pre-1900 school on the island closed, students typically headed to West Palm for schooling.

Prior to that shift, southeast Florida's first schoolhouse was congenital in Palm Beach in 1886. Information technology was located on the Lake Trail, about a mile north of the Flagler Memorial bridge; the refurbished building now is in Phipps Ocean Park and is function of the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach's "living history" program.

When that 1-room school closed in 1901, students headed over the bridge. After all, Palm Beach Public School wouldn't open for some other 20 years.

At first, most students went to a well-established 4-room school in downtown Due west Palm Embankment, but when area growth outpaced its chapters, another schoolhouse, chosen Fundamental School, was built on "The Loma" in 1908, about today's Kravis Center.

It opened in 1909 — and that's where Palm Beach High School'southward history technically starts because Central Schoolhouse served Chiliad-12 students.

The wilderness-surrounded school — parents worried about sending their kids to "the hinterland" — drew kids from Delray Beach to Jupiter. The start graduating senior class in 1913 numbered 7, including Palm Beacher Curtis E. Chillingworth (who afterwards became a prominent circuit court judge).

By 1915, a 2d building was added to serve grades 10-12. Amidst the students were those hailing from such old Palm Beach families as the Dimicks, Brelsfords and Reeses. Stafford Beach was valedictorian in 1916.

In 1922, a larger high-school edifice was added to the Central Schools campus, where the other two earlier buildings became junior high and simple schools.

Students wrote that the new "mod" high school "will be unsurpassed (with) the means to bring out the best in every student" and "will stand every bit a monument to futurity graduates of the foresight and citizenship of the people."

Many active years

The decades that followed would be filled with educatee involvement in everything from debate teams to school musicals to sports teams that routinely excelled, with plenty of trophies to show for information technology. A 1969 effect of the schoolhouse newspaper, The Frond, highlighted students' participation in a poetry festival, marching ring, winning-streak lawn tennis teams and more.

Today, an oft-cited era of Palm Beach Loftier revolves around the late 1940s and '50s. That'southward in part because it's when students included George Hamilton and the late Burt Reynolds, a Palm Beach High heartthrob and football game star.

RELATED: Burt Reynolds on Palm Beach: 'It'southward intoxicating'

At that fourth dimension, students enjoyed hanging out after their schoolhouse activities at a nearby drive-in snack stand — a hotspot known every bit The Hut — that was then all-American, the Sat Evening Mail featured a photo of students there in 1946.

"Wholesome" is how Carolyn Stroupe Stambaugh recalls her years at Palm Beach High, where she graduated in 1951. The one-time model and co-host of the original "Price is Correct" evidence also remembers "good teachers" and "esprit."

Her married man, the late ophthalmologist and celebrated preservationist Dr. Reginald Stambaugh, ran track and played football and first violin at the schoolhouse. In the late 1980s and early '90s, he led a campaign — ultimately successful — to preserve Palm Beach High'southward old building and other structures of the Central School'southward campus.

In 1992, Stambaugh, whose family unit was amid the beginning to settle Palm Beach County, besides rallied beau alumni as they recognized the school's distinguished graduates at a big outcome at The Breakers. 18 recipients of the Palm Beach High School Distinguished Alumni Awards ranged from Reynolds and Hamilton, to Marshall Criser, attorney and former president of the University of Florida and Harris Drew, a onetime Florida Supreme Court chief justice.

Palm Beach High School closed in 1970 because it was merged with some other high school to go Twin Lakes High School, which closed in 1988.

The historic campus buildings are now part of the Dreyfoos School of the Arts, opened in 1997 after the Palm Embankment County School of the Arts was founded in 1989. Islander Alexander Dreyfoos donated the majority funding involved in restoration and transition to the arts schoolhouse.

Edmund Duhy, a Dreyfoos School of the Arts Foundation board member and its founding principal, said Palm Beach High and Twin Lakes graduates frequently visit the Dreyfoos campus to see the historic buildings they once attended. With gratitude and nostalgia, "they have tears in their eyes," he said. "The buildings connect the present and the outstanding schoolhouse of the arts with the dreams of students in the past."

Mini museum

Memorabilia from Palm Embankment High Schoolhouse comprises a museum inside a small celebrated building in W Palm Embankment that once was located in Palm Beach.

The Dade County State Banking concern Building is at Fourth Street and Flagler Drive. It originally was built in 1893 and at one time was located at the west finish of present-twenty-four hour period Purple Poinciana Way.

The building subsequently was moved, and was recently named to the West Palm Beach Registry of Celebrated Buildings.

smithlihaboulady.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/story/news/history/2019/01/28/palm-beach-history-many-residents-enjoyed-high-school-days-on-hill/6178470007/