Hillsborough High School — Tampa, Florida

Hillsborough High School holds the title of the oldest high school in Hillsborough County, and a 2018 Tampa Magazine history calls it one of the oldest schools in the southeastern United States. The school has carried several names. A second Tampa Magazine history of the city's rival high schools says it was originally called Tampa High School and later Hillsborough County High School, and that its first graduating class received diplomas in 1886.

The founding date itself was revised in 2003. For decades the accepted account, set down in a 1985 centennial manuscript by faculty and alumni, held that the school began in 1885. Tampa Magazine reports that documents preserved in the cornerstone of the building Hillsborough occupied in 1911 confirmed that the school actually welcomed its first students in 1882 and graduated its first class of four students in 1886. The TampaPix history of Hillsborough High, which quotes the 1911 document, places that 1882 start in a high school course introduced at Tampa School No. 1, which stood on Franklin Street just north of the Hillsborough County courthouse.

The school moved through downtown Tampa and Tampa Heights for nearly half a century; Tampa Magazine counts eight moves before 1928. The rival schools history places an early campus on the southwest corner of Jefferson Street and 6th Avenue, now Henderson Avenue, in Tampa Heights. FOX 13 reported in 2016 that the original Hillsborough High School on 6th Avenue cost just $4,735 to build in 1886 and became the first school in the district to offer an organized high school curriculum.

The TampaPix history fills in the next stops. In 1892 the high school department moved into a new building erected by the City of Tampa just south of the old one, and in 1894 it was made a separate institution, permanently split from the grade school. After the freeze of 1895 postponed plans for a brick building, classes met for a year in the old Baptist Church at Twiggs and Tampa Streets, and from 1897 to 1900 the school leased four upper-floor rooms over the post office in the Wright building at Madison Street and Florida Avenue.

Tampa Magazine's rival schools history picks up from there. Growth prompted a new high school building in 1900 on the same Tampa Heights block, at Jefferson and Estelle. The city soon outgrew it, and a brick Hillsborough County High School opened on Highland Avenue, on the western side of Tampa Heights, at the start of the 1911 school year. By 1925 that building was also too small, and land was secured in Seminole Heights for a school that could hold over 2,000 students.

The Seminole Heights campus opened on Central Avenue for the 1928 school year. FOX 13 reported that the building was finished in September 1928 for $757,000 and ranked among the four largest high schools in the South when it opened. Local architect Francis Kennard designed the massive red brick building in the Gothic Revival style, according to both FOX 13 and Tampa Magazine, which marked the campus's 90th anniversary in 2018.

Details of the Central Avenue building show up in that Tampa Magazine feature. Its photographs include the Hillsborough High clock tower, stained glass windows in the school's auditorium, and a school logo that the Class of 1964 donated and embedded in the concrete of a common area. The rival schools history notes that the move from eastern Tampa Heights to western Tampa Heights and then to Seminole Heights over about 30 years tracked the pace and direction of Tampa's growth, at least for the city's white population, and that the planning of the 1920s left the school large enough for the decades that followed.

The University of Tampa grew out of Hillsborough High's orbit. The University of Tampa history page identifies Frederic H. Spaulding, the man who led the new institution in 1933, as the former principal of Hillsborough High School and the motivating force behind a first local university for Tampa's high school graduates. Tampa Junior College kept its headquarters at the local high school until August 2, 1933, when it moved into the former Tampa Bay Hotel and became the University of Tampa.

The connection reached the playing field as well. The Tampa athletics history says that when the university moved into the hotel in 1933, its football coach chose team colors drawn from the high schools his players came from. Many came from Hillsborough High, whose colors were red and black, and others from Plant High, which wore black and gold, so Hillsborough's red and black became part of the university's red, black and gold.

Academically, the school is known for its International Baccalaureate program. A Tampa Bay Times archive report from April 29, 2005, describes Hillsborough High's IB program, started in 1990, as the first in Hillsborough County; the district hoped it would draw students from across the county to the urban Seminole Heights campus. Limited public data on current enrollment and program offerings was available from the district for this page.

The Terrier is the Hillsborough High mascot, and red and black are the school colors, according to Tampa Magazine. The rival schools history describes Hillsborough versus Plant as one of the county's most important and most contested rivalries, particularly in the 1950s. Alumni remain organized: when the school marked its 130th anniversary on April 9, 2016, FOX 13 reported a Decades of Greatness event with campus tours, the Hillsborough High School band and a time capsule buried in the school's Positive Park. ABC Action News reported that alumni from the 1940s through the 1980s toured the campus and that the alumni association raises money for fourteen scholarships awarded to current Hillsborough High students each year.

For most of its history the school served only white students. Tampa Magazine's rival schools history states that African American students were not allowed to enroll at Hillsborough or Plant until the Hillsborough County school system fully integrated in 1971; before that, Middleton and Blake, with two exceptions, were the only public high school options for Black students in and around Tampa.

Growth later surrounded the old school with new ones. The same history counts 28 public high schools in Hillsborough County today, almost double the number before 1984, when Tampa and its immediate suburbs had only eight high schools. Tampa Magazine's 2018 profile lists public officials among Hillsborough High alumni, including former U.S. Rep. Charles Edward Bennett and former Tampa mayors Julian Lane and Dick Greco, and the rival schools history counts five former mayors of Tampa among its graduates.