In 1905, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, authorized Dr. Frank Gardner and his wife, Annie, to begin Flat Rock School, and in 1911 Flat Rock High School formally opened as the only high school on Sand Mountain north of Albertville. The North Alabama Methodist Conference approved Dr. Gardner as superintendent and Robert H. Hartford as the first principal. The first graduation was held in 1912. In 1914, construction began on a two-story administrative building made of stone quarried from Andrew Hogue's property, and when completed at a cost of $12,000, it contained four recitation halls, a library, an office, and a large auditorium with opera-style seating. Beginning in 1917, the auditorium hosted church services and school programs. The school offered a classical curriculum that included foreign languages as well as a diverse agricultural course of study. At its height, the 292-acre campus included two dormitories, a library, vocational building, grist mill, and sawmill, and a church historian called it "one of Methodism's best." Other principals were N. Homer Price, Isaac Carlton, Leon G. Alverson, George W. Floyd, and William Marvin McDonald, and the last superintendent was Dr. Samuel L. Dobbs. In the mid-1920s the boys' dormitory burned, and a few years later, in 1929, the girls' dormitory also burned. After these setbacks and diminished funding with the onset of the Great Depression, the board of trustees closed the school in 1929 and sold it to the State of Alabama. The Jackson County Board of Education later reopened it as a junior high school serving nine grades.