Residents of High Springs recognized the need for a public school for African Americans in 1886. By 1902, black students had moved into the Red Schoolhouse, a two-story wood frame building that had previously served as a school for whites, while white students moved into the two-story brick High Springs Grammar School. Black students used the Red Schoolhouse until it was destroyed by fire in 1925. A new school for blacks, Douglass High School, was built on this site in 1930 at a cost of $11,500, funded in part by the Julius Rosenwald Foundation and by $1,000 raised locally by the African American community. The original Douglass School was a one-story stucco building with eight classrooms and a staff of five teachers. Its first senior class graduated in 1937. By 1951, the school had twelve teachers and an enrollment of 340 students. A separate cafeteria building was constructed in 1955, and a three-classroom addition was built in the 1960s. The school was later renamed Douglass Elementary School. It closed in 1970 in response to desegregation, and most of it was torn down by the mid-1970s. Only the 1955 cafeteria building survives today.