Severn Teackle Wallis graduated from the secular St. Mary's College in northwest inner Baltimore in 1832, and later studied law with William Wirt, attorney general, and with noted lawyer John Glenn.

Wallis early developed a taste for literature and contributed to periodicals many articles of literary and historical criticism, also occasional verses.

While the high school moved to its first new building at the southwest corner of West Centre and North Howard Streets, dedicated 1875.

Thomas H. Hicks, as the authority of the Governor of Maryland at Frederick instead of the state capital at Annapolis which was then occupied by Massachusetts and New York militia under the command of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, deciding on the issue of secession and the state's relationship to the pending crisis and the forming war policies of President Abraham Lincoln.

In December 1872, as chairman of the art committee of private citizens appointed by the Maryland Legislature, he delivered the address upon the unveiling of sculptor William Henry Rinehart's statue of Maryland's own Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, of the United States Supreme Court, eight years after his death, having served since 1835 and the similarly long tenure of Chief Justice John Marshall.