Founded in 1952, the first class of freshman students was taught in the former St. Michael's Elementary school building, until 1954 when the new facility on Madison's hilltop opened.

Back then the hilltop of Madison was mainly all farmland, some of which had been donated to the local Catholic Church (St. Patrick's) years before.

[2] Father Shawe left St. Michael's in 1842 to become the Professor of Rhetoric at a new university in the growing Northern Indiana town of South Bend.

His teachings were very successful; the Golden Jubilee History of Notre Dame states, “soon came the eloquent and polished Father Michael E. Shawe, the promoter of Rhetoric and English Literature and the founder of the literary societies at Notre Dame … Here his memory is preserved with enthusiasm as one who gave to the university its first tendency towards that high literacy excellence to which it has attained”.

In 1951 after the priests of the area were told at a meeting in North Vernon that the Mother Superior of the Ursuline Sisters in Louisville, Kentucky, was willing to staff a Catholic High School in Madison.

[3] "Looking Back: The Story of the Hilltopper" was written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the school[4] which benefited the student newspaper, The Topper Tribune.

The little red-brick Catholic High School was fully loaded with a gymnasium, biology lab, chapel and cafeteria; all at a cost of $250,000.