Johnston’s first school opened on this site in 1873. The Male and Female Academy was a boarding school, with Rev. Luther Broaddus as its first principal. Alternately a private and public school during its early history, it was reorganized in 1884 as the Johnston Male and Female Institute. It became Johnston High School when it was sold to the town in 1906. A three-story brick high school was built here in 1910; it was torn down when the school closed in 1961. Henry Simms Hartzog (1866-1953), superintendent of the Institute from 1895 to 1897, left Johnston to become the third president of Clemson College. Dr. John Lake, who succeeded Hartzog as superintendent, was later a Baptist missionary to China. Joseph Earle Jacobs (1893-1971), a graduate of Johnston High School who taught there from 1914 to 1915, was a career diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1915 to 1957, most notably as Ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1949 and to Poland from 1955 to 1957.