It was built on the site of the Union Ridge Graded School (founded 1885)[1] after that building burned down in 1893.
[6] A descendant of the Hemings family of Monticello,[7] he grew up in the free Black community of Union Ridge and had been the first teacher at the one-room Ivy Creek school, and the first principal of the Union Ridge Graded School.
[1] John G. Shelton served as Principal in the 1910s;[3] he was also editor of the Charlottesville Messenger, the city's Black newspaper at the time.
Mary Carr Greer served as the school's principal from 1931 to 1949, after teaching Domestic Science there for fifteen years.
[8] She worked to develop an accredited 4-year curriculum similar to that in white high schools of the period.