Cookeville High School

Cookeville High School is a public secondary education facility located in Cookeville, Tennessee. It is part of the Putnam County School System. History According to Putnam County historian Mary Jean DeLozier, the first ‘high school’ established in Cookeville, Tennessee, was a privately funded, four-year subscription high school called Washington Academy. It was established in 1891, on Spring St. where the Cookeville City Hall is today. In 1894, the state transferred Washington Academy into a newly incorporated high school named Cookeville High School. One principal and five teachers constituted the entire twelve-grade faculty with 175 students. In 1899, the old building was razed and a new one built on the same site called Cookeville Collegiate Institute, which was financed by subscriptions, donations, and out-of-town tuition. The school taught eight elementary and four secondary grades in a two-story frame building with 8 rooms and a four-acre yard. After the city of Cookeville incorporated in 1903 and levied taxes for education, its new school used the Cookeville Collegiate Institute building and kept that name for several years until it became known as Cookeville City School in the late 1900s. In 1914, Putnam County levied a 10-cent property tax for education and moved to provide public high school education for all children in Putnam County. In the fall of 1914, Dixie College (later known as Tennessee Polytechnic Institute and today known as Tennessee Technological University) opened the first four-year, county-owned high school. Students attended high school at Dixie College until 1924, when college officials decided they could no longer accommodate high school students. Students then moved back to Cookeville City School. In the 1920s and 1930s, civic leaders began to call for building a new high school in the Cookeville area, but the Quarterly Court (today known as the County Commission) twice refused to vote bonds for a new building.