Old Pahokee High School

History of the Old Pahokee High School

Located at 360 East Main Street in Pahokee, Florida, the old Pahokee High School is the oldest surviving school building in the city and serves as a reflection of the community’s—and Palm Beach County’s—educational development. The structure holds additional significance as the most architecturally distinctive building in Pahokee and stands as a representative example of the work of William Manly King during his tenure as architect for the Palm Beach County School Board.

Historical Context

At the turn of the twentieth century, pioneers began settling along the southeastern shore of Lake Okeechobee in a place that came to be known as East Beach. Most of these early residents supported themselves through fishing, though the land itself held promise for farming. That potential, however, was limited by persistent drainage issues and a lack of reliable transportation. Slowly, improvements were made. Work on the North New River Canal, designed to connect Lake Okeechobee with Fort Lauderdale, began in 1906 and was completed six years later, opening the region to broader possibilities.

In 1914, Dr. L. W. Armstrong, a dentist from Fort Pierce, moved with his wife and father-in-law, Henry Ridenour, to farmland near what became Pahokee. By 1917, Noble Padgett purchased Section 20 from the Southern States Land and Timber Company for $20 an acre, establishing the community’s agricultural base. Around the same time, fisherman John Ingram introduced celery grower B. A. Howard to the area. Recognizing its potential, Howard and investors F. F. Dutton and T. Lane Moore bought nearly 400 acres of Section 18 for $49,000 and formed the Pahokee Realty Company, subdividing the land into farm tracts and town lots, with each 10-acre farm parcel including a town lot.

Although surveyors first called the settlement “Ridgeway Beach,” Howard and his associates secured a post office in 1918 under the name “Pahokee,” derived from a Seminole word meaning “grassy waters.” Howard soon relocated to the property to oversee its development. Progress was slow at first, with boats providing the only means of transportation, but Howard persevered. When his discouraged partners sold out, he bought their shares and pressed forward, founding the Bank of Pahokee, constructing the town’s first packinghouse, and operating boats to move produce.

Establishment of the Palm Beach County school system

One of the earliest priorities for the small settlements around Lake Okeechobee was the establishment of schools. The first school in western Palm Beach County was founded at Long Beach in 1913. It was a modest, one-room frame building that opened with twenty-two students. A year later, a second school was built just south of Pahokee at Pelican Point, later known as Bacom Point, which quickly enrolled eighty-six students. At one time or another, nearly every child in the area passed through its doors. Even after a central school opened in Pahokee in 1918, the Bacom Point school continued to serve younger children who were too small to make the long walk into town.

By 1919, another school had been established in Canal Point, and in 1922, the community opened the Smith-Hughes Agricultural High School. The school was funded in part through the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which provided federal and state aid to support agricultural education. In 1925, these funds also allowed for the hiring of H. L. Speer as a vocational agriculture instructor. For several years, Canal Point housed the only high school in the western reaches of the county, attracting students from as far away as Clewiston. By 1927, its enrollment had grown to more than 250.

Meanwhile, Pahokee had expanded enough to justify its own high school. Through the efforts of James Richard York, a site was secured in 1925, and on March 6, 1928, Masonic officials laid the cornerstone for the new building. Construction began that summer, but before the school could open, the devastating hurricane of September 1928 struck the region in mid-September.

The 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane

This storm, later known as the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane, is the deadliest hurricane to hit the state of Florida, with an estimated death toll of at least 2,500, most of whom were around Lake Okeechobee when the flood waters spilled over the southern edge of the lake. The storm surge obliterated more than twenty miles of earthen dikes, flooding hundreds of square miles to depths as great as 20 feet. Thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed, most of which were washed away by the torrential waters.

More than 500 residents sought refuge in the unfinished Pahokee High School building, which withstood the storm and safely sheltered its occupants. For weeks afterward, the structure continued to serve as a refuge for displaced families as thousands of Floridians were left homeless.

Floodwaters lingered for weeks, hampering efforts to clear the destruction. Local burial services were soon overwhelmed, and many victims had to be interred in mass graves. Approximately three-quarters of those who perished were migrant farm workers, which made identifying the dead—and accounting for the missing—extremely difficult. As a result, the official death toll remains imprecise. Port Mayaca is the site of a mass grave containing 1,600 victims, and West Palm Beach of another containing 674 black victims, as burials were segregated at the time.

Others were burned in funeral pyres. Pahokee resident and future police chief Carmen Salvatore, a survivor of the 1928 hurricane, later described the grim conditions in the days that followed. “After about the fifth day, we couldn’t handle it,” he recalled. “You couldn’t identify them, and we had to burn them.” At the time, Salvatore was 32 years old. He remembered bodies piled on the Pahokee dock “like cordwood,” with the stench of decay hanging heavy in the humid air. Salvatore also recalled later finding human bones while tilling his land for crops.

Pahokee High School

Due to the severity of the storm, Pahokee High School did not open until 1930, with J. R. York serving as its first principal. His wife, Loula Virginia Lewis York, was among the inaugural faculty and continued teaching there until her retirement in the late 1950s. With the school’s opening, Canal Point’s high school students were transferred to Pahokee, while the Canal Point facility remained in use as an elementary and junior high school. Shortly after the end of the school’s first term, J. R. York died on July 24, 1931.

Pahokee High School quickly became the only high school on the eastern shore of Lake Okeechobee and received full accreditation during the 1938–39 academic year. From 1930 until 1966, the building housed both junior and senior high school students; the junior high classes were moved into a separate facility in 1966.

William Manly King, the Architect

The Pahokee High School was designed by William Manly King, a prominent architect in Palm Beach County, best known for his extensive work designing public schools and civic buildings during the first half of the 20th century. King was born in Macon, Mississippi, and pursued studies in architecture and engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He began his professional career in Birmingham, Alabama, working in the office of architect Harry Wheelock. Before long, the two established a partnership that lasted ten years.

In the 1920s and 1930s, as Palm Beach County experienced rapid growth, King became the official architect for the Palm Beach County School Board. In this role, he designed dozens of schools across the county, many of which blended Mediterranean Revival, Art Deco, and Classical Revival styles, reflecting the architectural trends of the era. His designs emphasized both functionality and aesthetic presence, giving small communities enduring landmarks that often became focal points of civic life.

At one time, King was credited with designing 90% of the public schools in Palm Beach County. These include the Palm Beach Junior College (1927), the Old Jupiter School (1927), Boynton Beach High School (1927), and Osbourne School (1948). In addition to schools, his other notable works include Harder Hall (1925), the Hibiscus Garden Apartments (1926), and the Old West Palm Beach National Guard Armory (1939).

In addition to Pahokee High School, King also designed the Pahokee City Hall building (1941), a commercial building for Carmen Salvatore, and a new $140,000 hotel in Pahokee, although the hotel was never built.

Expansion of the Pahokee High School

At one point, the school was much larger than its present iteration. In 1935, a wing was added to the north end of the building, followed by another wing at the south end in 1941. To accommodate these expansions, several arches of the arcaded corridor were enclosed with brick. That same year, the two wings were connected by the construction of an auditorium, which created an enclosed courtyard between them.

Closure

To relieve crowding, a new Pahokee Elementary School was constructed off Larrimore Road in the mid-1960s, allowing the existing high school campus to dedicate more space to older students. Earlier, in 1941, East Lake School had been built to serve the growing Black community; it was later converted into a middle school. Pahokee High School was officially integrated in 1960, reflecting broader social changes in Palm Beach County. After decades as the educational center of the community, Pahokee High School closed its doors in 1988.

Following the school’s closure, the south wing was demolished in 1988, and the north wing followed in 1995. The auditorium, damaged by a fire in 1993, was also demolished. On November 15, 1996, the Old Pahokee High School building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. By the time it was photographed and listed on the Register of Historic Places, the building had long been abandoned. It wasn’t until recently that the building was restored.

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