Mount Hope School History

By 1872 only three families, those of C.C. Brown, the Warners, and the McGinnises, lived in the area now known as Mount Hope. They built a one-room wooden schoolhouse, replacing the first school held in the Blake Ian kitchen and in a tenant house on the Brown farm, showing the importance of education to these early settlers. The school was built at the head of the valley, and McGinnis felt it should be named Mount Hope School. Another room was added in 1887. After several coal mines opened in the area at the turn of the century, the school grew to six rooms, and later ten rooms and an auditorium were added. After the school was lost in the fire of 1910, two separate schools were built: a twelve-room grade school with an auditorium, library, and office, and a brick high school with large classrooms, an office, and a basement. In 1917 a brick six-room building known as Dubois School was constructed for the area’s African-American students, and in 1925 a brick building with twenty-one rooms was built in the center of town as Mount Hope High School. In 1956, with integration, Mount Hope and Dubois High Schools were joined into one school in the new Dubois High School building, the name was changed to Mount Hope High School, and the old school became Mount Hope Junior High.

Mount Hope, West Virginia · United States