San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
City’s first public high school started slowly
Do you have any information on San Antonio High School? Where was it located? I found some really cool pieces on it in the personal diary of a woman (Isabel Wefing) who attended in the late 1910s.
— Joe Rosales The alumna’s collection included mementos from the June 1916 commencement exercises of San Antonio High School in addition to her graduation year of 1917. At that time, the school held two graduations a year; Isabel Josephine Wefing was a member of the last class it graduated under that name. Among her souvenirs were a felt armband printed with “SAHS” in the school’s red-and-white colors, a handwritten list that might be a dance card and a class day ticket for 1917.
As detailed in a column about Fox Tech High School (May 23, 2010), this was the city’s first public secondary school, founded in 1879 as part of a “oneteacher facility for all grades” known as Central Grammar and High School, according to a history provided by San Antonio Independent School District.
This institution first operated in the Firemen’s Hall, headquarters for Hook and Ladder and No. 2 Engine companies on Avenue C (later Broadway) just north of Houston Street. The following year, classes migrated to the former Vance Barracks, the first Army barracks in San Antonio, built by the Vance and Bros. mercantile at the corner of Navarro and Travis streets behind the present site of the Gunter Hotel. By 1881, the high school found a temporary home in the basement of the original Temple Beth-El synagogue at Travis and Jefferson streets.
Renamed High School and Central Grammar, comprising the higher grades of the city’s overcrowded public grammar schools, the institution came to rest in 1883 when a three-story stone building opened at 463-7 Acequia Street (later 637 Main Ave.). Known as School No. 1 after a consolidation, it officially became San Antonio High
School in 1908 after the “No. 1” designation went to a new elementary school that year. The upper school was familiarly referred to most often as “the high school” or “High School.”
If it seems impossible that the largest city in the state — with a population of 96,614 in 1910 — could be served by a single high school, it makes more sense when you consider that through the 19th century, a high school education was largely reserved for the children of the elite, who didn’t have to contribute their wages to the household income or their labor to the family business. As of the U.S. census of 1900, only 3 percent of Americans had graduated from high school, making it comparable to today’s 2 percent of Americans who hold doctoral degrees.
The ancestors of Central Catholic High School, the Ursuline Academy and the German-English School all had been founded here in the 1850s, but they were private schools that charged tuition. A few well-to-do families sent their children out of state to boarding schools in Virginia and New England or had them tutored privately at home.
The first public high school represented an important opportunity for middle-class families who couldn’t afford these luxury options but could do without their teens’ lost wages.
A report on the new city high school in the San Antonio Light, June 4, 1883, notes that a total of 45 students, ages 15-20, were enrolled for the coming fall term. The course of study was meant to take four years (grades 8-11), “during which time the following subjects are taught: languages (Latin, German, English analysis and literature),
mathematics (geometry and trigonometry), science (natural philosophy, chemistry, physiology) and history (ancient and modern). At that time, only four students who had graduated from the city’s previously peripatetic high school, all girls, had gone on to higher education at universities or normal schools (for teacher training).
It took some time for the city’s parents and students to adjust to the idea of spending those extra years in school. In 1890, the graduation class consisted of just four girls. For years, administrators tossed around ideas for increasing enrollment and retention — six years or four, more electives or something like a core curriculum? Classical or more practical studies?
Meanwhile, the high school improved its course offerings, including more hands-on science courses under the supervision of future Witte Museum director Ellen Schulz Quillin, Saturday courses in German and Spanish, promotions and summer school for accelerated graduation and a range of extracurricular activities such as chorus, orchestra, the Huisache yearbook and sports competition with the city’s private schools.
By the time Wefing graduated in 1917, her class counted a record-setting 223 students, all the more impressive considering that the school held two graduations each year, one in February and one in June. Only a year ago, the class of June 1916 had been the largest. The swelling numbers pointing to the reason for the building of a second high school, initially referred to as the “South Side High School” for its location on Garden Street (later South St. Mary’s), in south central San Antonio. The original school also was rebuilt, and the more modern, three-story building was renamed Main Avenue High School beginning with the 1917-18 school year.
Wefing’s classmates, called the “Junes,” actually graduated on May 22, 1917, not only as the largest class in the history of San Antonio High School but the first to hold their commencement in the auditorium of the brand-new George W. Brackenridge High School, as opposed to the old Majestic Theater (covered here Jan. 19, 2019) or Beethoven Hall, venues for previous high school classes.
More than 2,000 people attended the May 1917 ceremony, which included a sermon, speeches, and school orchestra and choral performances. Students were presented with college scholarships to Baylor, Southwestern, the University of Texas and the University of Virginia. One graduate won a prize for the prettiest graduation dress made by herself for under $5. Guest speaker F.M. Bralley, president of the College of Industrial Arts in Denton, spoke on the importance of high schools in teaching the value of democracy.
When school started again in the fall, both Brackenridge and Main Avenue were open, and students were allowed to choose which high school they wished to attend, usually for geographical convenience. The next new city high school was Jefferson, opened in 1932 in what was then considered far Northwest San Antonio. That same year, Main Avenue was repurposed and renamed San Antonio Vocational and Technical School (now Fox Tech).
After earning her high school diploma, according to city directories, Wefing worked first at the A.B. Frank Co., a large dry-goods wholesaler, and by 1921 was a “typist, U.S. government.” She married Myron R. Wood, a pilot stationed first at Kelly Field, then Randolph. His career took them eventually to Washington, D.C.; Isabel stayed in Arlington, Va., while her husband served in England during World War II. Brig. Gen. Wood, by then chief of supply for the Army Air Force, died Oct. 29, 1946, in Washington, D.C., of a heart attack. His widow died in 1988 and was buried next to her husband in Arlington National Cemetery.