Sunset High School
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Designated as a city of Dallas landmark and the sixth oldest high school in Dallas, Sunset High School has served the Oak Cliff Community for 90 years. The buildings were imbued with the talent of some of the best creative Texas minds of their time. Experienced architects Roscoe Plimpton DeWitt and Mark Lemmon worked with the contractor J.A. Rife Construction Co. To design the first buildings that would serve as Sunset High School. The school was named for the residential district it is located in and opened on September 21, 1925. The facility was built to accommodate two thousand students, but the first year only saw fourteen hundred. During the Great Depression, the federal art project of the new deal hired Granville Bruce to paint two murals in the school library. These oil paintings depict major moments in Texas settlement history. There would be many renovations and additions to the buildings throughout the century. During World War II, Korea and Vietnam, many Sunset students went overseas with the military. The newer school entry holds plaques honoring those students and faculty casualties of these conflicts. The school’s 1932 orchestra was the largest high school orchestra in Dallas at the time and the 1964 band participated in the San Antonio Battle of Flowers Parade. The Sunset Bison football team won the state championship in 1950 and the zone championship in 1960. The Sunset basketball team won the state championship in 1944. Sunset has also been presented the Sanger trophy for overall athletic excellence twelve times.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Opened in 1925 to serve Dallas's Oak Cliff, Sunset High School rose from the drafting tables of noted Texas architects in a district that gave the school its name. Built for two thousand students, it grew across the century with New Deal-era library murals of Texas settlement, championship teams, and a celebrated orchestra and band. Plaques near its entry honor students and faculty lost in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.
Why it matters
As one of Dallas's oldest schools and a designated city landmark, Sunset embodies how a neighborhood high school becomes a century-long anchor of community identity and civic memory.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Sunset High School opened its doors on September 21, 1925, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, during the confident, expanding years of the early twentieth century. American cities were growing outward into streetcar suburbs and residential districts, and a rising population meant a rising demand for schools—big, permanent, purpose-built schools that announced a neighborhood had arrived.
Oak Cliff was one of those growing Dallas districts, and Sunset took its very name from the residential area around it. Building a high school designed to hold two thousand students was a statement of faith in the future: the city expected Oak Cliff to keep filling up, and it did. That first year enrolled fourteen hundred, with room to spare for the growth everyone assumed was coming.
The 1920s and 1930s that shaped Sunset's early decades ran from that optimistic boom straight into the Great Depression—a whipsaw the school's own history records, from its ambitious construction to the New Deal art that would soon decorate its library.
People & events
Sunset was built by some of the best creative Texas minds of its time. The experienced architects Roscoe Plimpton DeWitt and Mark Lemmon designed the first buildings, working with the contractor J.A. Rife Construction Co. These were not anonymous drafters; they were established professionals whose talent was, as the marker puts it, imbued into the buildings themselves.
Then the Depression arrived, and it left its mark on the school in an unexpectedly beautiful way. Through the federal art project of the New Deal, the painter Granville Bruce was hired to create two oil murals for the school library, depicting major moments in Texas settlement history. It is a small, vivid example of how the New Deal put artists to work and left ordinary public buildings adorned with art meant for everyone.
And then there is the long parade of student life that a school accumulates across a century. Sunset students went overseas with the military in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and the school's newer entry holds plaques honoring the students and faculty lost in those conflicts. The halls also fill with triumphs: the 1944 state basketball championship, the football Bison's state title in 1950, the 1932 orchestra that was the largest high school orchestra in Dallas, the 1964 band marching in San Antonio's Battle of Flowers Parade, and the Sanger trophy for athletic excellence won twelve times.
Its place in the American story
Sunset tells a distinctly American story: how a neighborhood high school becomes a century-long anchor of community identity. All across the country, the big early-twentieth-century public high school was more than a place to take classes. It was where a district's children were shaped into citizens, where families gathered on Friday nights, and where a community's memory was quietly stored.
The school also carries, in its own walls, two great national experiences. The New Deal murals in its library are a piece of the federal effort that, during the Depression, treated art as public work and public good—placing paintings in schools, post offices, and libraries so that culture was not reserved for the few. Sunset's library became, in effect, a small gallery of that national project.
And the memorial plaques near the entry connect this one Dallas school to the largest events of the twentieth century. In World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, ordinary American high schools sent their graduates overseas, and too many did not come home. A school that honors those names is doing what communities everywhere have done: holding civic memory, generation after generation, so that the young people walking past the plaques know whose shoulders they stand on.
If you visit
Begin at the entrance, where the plaques honor the students and faculty lost in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It is a quiet, powerful reminder that the young people who passed through these doors went on to some of the century's hardest moments—read the names, and let the century open up in front of you.
Sunset is a designated City of Dallas landmark and the sixth-oldest high school in the city, so let your eye take in the architecture that DeWitt and Lemmon designed nearly a hundred years ago. A century of renovations and additions has layered itself onto the original buildings, so you are really looking at time itself, block by block—the ambitious 1920s core wrapped in the improvements of the decades that followed.
The library holds the school's real treasure: two Depression-era murals of Texas settlement history, painted by Granville Bruce under the New Deal art project. As with any working school, access is not something to assume—but the story travels with you regardless. Standing in the Oak Cliff neighborhood that gave the school its name, you can feel how a great neighborhood high school becomes the beating heart of the place around it: home to championship teams, a record-setting orchestra, and generations of families who still call themselves Bisons.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Roscoe Plimpton DeWitt
- · Mark Lemmon
- · Granville Bruce
Themes & tags
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