West High School is a public high school located at 179 South Powell Avenue on the west side of Columbus, Ohio, in the Westgate neighborhood of The Hilltop. It is part of Columbus City Schools and serves students in grades 9 through 12. The school's athletic teams compete as the Cowboys, and its colors are buff and brown. The current building, designed by architect Howard Dwight Smith and opened in 1929, occupies ground that was once part of Camp Chase, a Union Army training and prisoner-of-war camp during the American Civil War. West High School has served the west side of Columbus for more than a century and has produced graduates who have distinguished themselves in music, professional athletics, military service, space exploration, and journalism.
History
Origins and the west side of Columbus West High School traces its origins to the growth of Columbus's west side during the final decades of the nineteenth century. As the city expanded westward along the National Road — now West Broad Street — the population of The Hilltop and its surrounding neighborhoods increased steadily, placing pressure on the Columbus City Schools district to establish new educational facilities on that side of the city.
The immediate cause of the school's creation was overcrowding at Central High School during the 1890s. As enrollment at Central outpaced the building's capacity, a portion of students was separated and relocated to a secondary location, establishing the foundation for what would become three new schools, including West High School. West High was one of a set of cardinal-direction high schools — along with East, North, South, and Central — that Columbus established to serve distinct geographic quadrants of the growing city.
First building (1908–1929) Construction of the first dedicated West High School building began in the summer of 1907 on a site at the corner of South Central Avenue and Town Street. The building was designed by David Riebel (August 7, 1855 – July 29, 1935), a German-American architect who became the first head of the architectural department of the Columbus Board of Education in 1893 and served in that role until 1922, designing approximately forty Columbus public school buildings during his tenure. His firm, David Riebel & Sons, was described by The Ohio Architect, Engineer and Builder in 1915 as among the oldest and most respected architectural practices in Columbus.
The building was constructed in the Neo-Classical Revival style and opened on September 8, 1908, at 120 South Central Avenue, with formal dedication following in March 1909. The school's yearbook, issued annually from the earliest years of its operation, was titled The Occident — a reference to the west, consistent with the school's geographic identity on the western side of Columbus. By 1916, the school enrolled 457 pupils and employed 19 teachers under principal Otto H. Magly and vice-principal Augusta Connolley.
When the new West High School building opened in 1929, the original South Central Avenue structure was converted for use as Starling Junior High School. Starling Junior High School closed in 2012.
The 1929 building and the Camp Chase site Construction of the present building began on June 6, 1927, at 179 South Powell Avenue. The building opened in 1929 and has remained in continuous operation at that location.
The land on which the school stands carries historical significance predating the school itself. Camp Chase was a Union Army training and prisoner of war camp established in May 1861, four miles west of downtown Columbus, on land leased by the federal government. Named for Salmon P. Chase — then Secretary of the Treasury under President Abraham Lincoln and a former Governor of Ohio — the camp served as a training ground for Ohio volunteer soldiers, a parole camp, a muster-out post, and eventually a large prisoner-of-war facility. Its boundaries corresponded to present-day Broad Street to the north, Hague Avenue to the east, Sullivant Avenue to the south, and Westgate Avenue to the west. Approximately 150,000 Union soldiers trained there and approximately 25,000 Confederate prisoners passed through it between 1861 and 1865, with more than 2,200 dying in captivity. After the camp closed in 1865, its structures were gradually dismantled and the land passed into private hands. The Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery, located at 2900 Sullivant Avenue, is the only surviving physical remnant of the camp and contains 2,260 graves. The Westgate neighborhood, including the Powell Avenue school grounds, was developed on former camp land beginning in the 1920s, when the area was built out as a streetcar suburb.
Subsequent development and the grade restructuring In 1953, a third-floor addition to the northwest wing of the building was completed, expanding the school's capacity. Subsequent renovations added a two-story wing containing a library learning center, a vocational business education unit, a guidance suite, and dedicated space for the instrumental music program.
From 1966 until 1980, West High School served only tenth through twelfth grade students, as Columbus converted its junior high schools to middle schools serving grades six through eight and separated the ninth grade into its own tier. In the fall of 1980, when the district completed its restructuring of the middle school model, the ninth grade was returned to the high schools and West High resumed serving all four high school grade levels.
In 1979, one year before the ninth grade returned, Columbus City Schools received students from outside West High's traditional attendance area under a federal court order for desegregation, substantially altering the school's enrollment composition. The effects of that order on the school and district are addressed in the Desegregation section below.
Architecture
Howard Dwight Smith and the design of the building The present West High School building was designed by Howard Dwight Smith (February 21, 1886 – April 27, 1958), one of the most consequential architects in the history of central Ohio. Smith was born in Dayton, Ohio, and graduated from The Ohio State University in 1907 with a degree in civil engineering. He subsequently earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Columbia University in 1910 and received a Perkins Traveling Fellowship in 1911, which funded ten months of architectural study in Europe, principally in Italy. The classical monuments he studied during that fellowship, particularly the Pantheon and the Colosseum in Rome, left a lasting impression on his design philosophy that would be visible in his most prominent subsequent projects.
After his return from Europe, Smith joined the New York firm of John Russell Pope, one of the foremost architects of the Beaux-Arts tradition in America, where he served as chief designer and worked on the Vanderbilt mansion on Long Island and the Henry Clay Frick residence on Fifth Avenue. Around 1917, he was persuaded to return to Columbus to design a new football stadium for The Ohio State University. Ohio Stadium, completed in 1922, was at its opening the largest two-level, open-ended stadium in the world, and its horseshoe form — inspired by Smith's study of the Roman Colosseum — became one of the most recognized sports venues in the United States. In 1921, Smith received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for Public Building Design for Ohio Stadium.
Smith served as chief architect for the Columbus Board of Education from 1921 to 1929, during which time he designed West High School along with approximately twenty-five other schools across central Ohio. West High School and Columbus City Hall stand among the most prominent examples of his civic work outside the Ohio State campus. He then returned to Ohio State as University Architect, a position he held from 1929 to 1956, during which he designed or oversaw more than thirty campus buildings, including St. John Arena, the Thompson Library stack tower, and numerous dormitories and academic facilities. Smith died on April 27, 1958, and is buried at Green Lawn Cemetery in Columbus.
The building West High School reflects the neoclassical design principles Smith developed through his European study and refined in his work on Ohio Stadium. The building presents a formal, symmetrical brick facade with classical detailing consistent with Smith's approach to public civic architecture. Its scale and permanence were deliberate: Smith believed, as his granddaughter later recalled, that no matter one's circumstances, everyone deserves a well-built, beautifully designed place to work and learn.
The interior retains notable period features, including small murals in the auditorium, some depicting airships, that reflect the design sensibilities of the era in which the building was constructed. The main administrative office is situated on the second floor, an arrangement preserved from the original design. The building has been recognized among the most architecturally distinguished high schools in central Ohio.
The cupola A defining exterior feature is the building's cupola, which raises West High School to 90 feet — the tallest structure on the west side of Columbus. Atop the cupola sits a weathervane in the form of pioneers traveling in a covered wagon, a deliberate reference to the school's Cowboys nickname and to the history of westward settlement associated with The Hilltop and the National Road corridor.
In August 2016, the original cupola, which had stood for nearly ninety years, was declared structurally unsafe and removed. Its absence was felt acutely by alumni and community members alike; one alumnus compared the feeling to the theft of the Confederate soldier statue atop the nearby Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery memorial, which had left that monument seeming incomplete. The Columbus City Schools Board of Education approved approximately $343,000 for a replacement, and a new cupola — identical in appearance to the original but constructed of lighter, weather-resistant materials — was installed in 2018. The new cupola weighs 75 pounds less than the original and is built to withstand Ohio's weather conditions more durably. A lighting ceremony held on April 10, 2018, drew alumni, students, school board members, and community members to celebrate the restoration. Board of Education President Gary Baker, a former Hilltop resident, stated at the ceremony that the cupola was critical to the fabric and identity of The Hilltop community, and Columbus City Schools Interim Superintendent John Stanford pledged continued investment in both the building and its students.
Desegregation
West High School and Columbus City Schools occupied a central position in one of the most consequential school desegregation cases in American legal history. The litigation arose from conditions that had developed over decades. In 1976, at the time of trial, roughly 70 percent of the district's approximately 96,000 students attended schools that were at least 80 percent white or 80 percent black, and half of the district's 172 schools were 90 percent or more racially homogeneous.
In 1973, fourteen minority students filed a class action suit in federal court in Columbus, charging that the Columbus Board of Education had pursued policies that intentionally caused and perpetuated racial segregation throughout the district. The case was tried over thirty-six days in 1976, producing a record of more than 6,600 transcript pages and over 600 exhibits.