Knoxville High School 1950s

KHP supporter Mary Mellen Clark shared this photograph of Knoxville High School with us last year. The xxx car parked on Central Street places the shot sometime in the 1950s or ‘60s. Designed by Baumann and Baumann, the school was completed in 1910. Of the thousands of students who graduated there, perhaps its two most famous alumni include author James Agee (1909-1955), who attended around 1924-25, and wrote his first short stories there. He won a Pulitzer Prize, posthumously, for A Death in the Family (1957). In the 1940s, student Patricia Neal appeared in her first plays on the KHS stage, gaining warm reviews in the local press. She earned an Oscar for her performance in Hud (1963). In recent years, Knoxville High School has been converted into apartments as Knoxville High Senior Living.