North Dallas High School
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The city's fifth high school opened in 1922 on the far north edge of Dallas. At the time, there were three high schools for Caucasian students (Bryan Street, Oak Cliff and Forest) and one for African Americans (Booker T. Washington). The school board responded to growing enrollment with plans for a new school on John H. Cole's farm, the site of the first Texas State Fair in 1886. Board member Clinton Russell chose the site and helped plan the school. He took trips at his own expense to study schools in other cities, and he visited the site daily to personally supervise construction. William B. Ittner of St. Louis, Missouri, who designed hundreds of schools across the U.S., was chosen as architect of North Dallas High School (NDHS). The doors opened on February 13, 1922 with 650 students and E.B. Comstock as the first principal. The first graduating class began an alumni association and established two main events: an Easter morning breakfast and a banquet soon after Christmas. The school mascot (Bulldogs), yearbook (Viking) and colors (orange and white) were chosen in the first few years. The Bulldogs captured many city athletic championships, and an Oct. 1930 football game between North Dallas and Sunset High in the new Fair Park Stadium (later the Cotton Bowl) drew 45,000 fans, then a state record for a high school event. Many distinguished alumni have had notable careers in business, politics and the arts. Court-ordered school desegregation began in Dallas in 1960. Thirty years later, the NDHS student body was 65 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Asian, and thirty-two different countries of origin were represented. The state Legislature and U.S. Congress recognized NDHS as the first international school in the state and nation. (2008)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
North Dallas High School opened in 1922 on the city's northern edge — on land that had hosted the first Texas State Fair — as the school board scrambled to keep pace with a booming population. Designed by nationally known school architect William B. Ittner, it quickly built traditions, a fierce athletic reputation, and a devoted alumni association; a 1930 football game there drew a record 45,000 fans. Over the following decades desegregation and waves of immigration transformed its student body, and the school earned recognition as the first officially designated international school in the state and nation.
Why it matters
NDHS traces the full arc of twentieth-century urban American education — from a segregated system through court-ordered integration to a globally diverse student body — in a single institution.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · William B. Ittner
- · Clinton Russell
- · E.B. Comstock
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Sons of Hermann in Dallas
Dallas, TX
Founded in New York in 1840 to preserve German traditions and ease immigrants' entry into American life, the Sons of Hermann established a Texas Grand Lodge in San Antonio in 1890. Dallas lodges soon joined, running German-language schooling for children from 1893 and pressing the State Fair to add a German day. By the 1920s the order was among the largest fraternal groups in the nation, and its Elm Street hall endured as a dance hall, bowling alley, and gathering place.
Zion Lutheran Church
Dallas, TX
As German Lutherans settled in Dallas in the 1870s, they gathered for worship—first in borrowed Baptist facilities—and in 1879 organized under Rev. G. Birkmann, who served as both pastor and schoolteacher. That same year the congregation built a structure holding a sanctuary, parsonage, and school. The church dropped German-language services in 1940, took the name Zion Lutheran in 1944, and still serves the city's spiritual and educational needs.
Lincoln High School
Dallas, TX
In the depths of the Jim Crow era, Dallas needed a modern high school for its Black students, whose only option had been the overcrowded Booker T. Washington campus miles away. Backed partly by a New Deal Public Works Administration grant, Lincoln High School opened in January 1939 with 1,255 students and a striking Moderne building whose glass-brick tower became a neighborhood landmark. Under founding principal Tueria Dell Marshall, enrollment surged past 3,000, and the school produced more than 200 educators among its distinguished alumni.
Lake Highlands Elementary School
Dallas, TX
Lake Highlands Elementary opened in 1955 amid the postwar suburban boom that swelled the Richardson School District, its six rooms soon doubled to keep up with growth. The marker frankly records the era's segregation: before 1955 local Black children attended the separate Little Egypt School, and Richardson's schools stayed segregated until 1965, the same year a new campus for African-American students rose in Hamilton Park. Lake Highlands also became a mid-century innovator, among the first schools in the nation to teach by television in 1960.