SQUIRREL HILL HISTORY
NAMING
SQUIRREL HILL SCHOOLS By Helen Wilson, Vice President, Squirrel Hill Historical Society
Above: Students line the steps of Colfax School No. 1, ca. 1880. Courtesy of Squirrel Hill Historical Society. Below: Taylor Allderdice, as depicted in The Story of the Sesqui-centennial Celebration of Pittsburgh (1910).
WHEN YOU BUILD A SCHOOL, YOU HAVE TO GIVE IT
were named for Walter Forward (1786–1852), a renowned
A NAME. In the past, almost all of Squirrel Hill’s public
lawyer who held a number of government positions,
schools were named for noteworthy industrialists and
including U.S. Congressman and Treasury Secretary. Judge
politicians who took a great interest in education, or at
Forward’s large estate was located a short distance up
least lived where a school was later built. Discovering
Forward Avenue, where Pittsburgh Allderdice High School
who these people were and why schools were named
now stands.
for them is itself an education, and it would take a book to present a full biography of their lives and achievements. Here is information about just some of them.
“Dice” was built in 1926 and named for Taylor Allderdice, president of the National Tube Company and one of the first members of the Pittsburgh Board of Education when it was
Education in Squirrel Hill has a long
created in 1911. Until around 20 years ago,
history. One early source mentions a
the high school’s name was Taylor Allderdice
log cabin school existing around Shady
High School. After Mark Roosevelt
and Phillips Avenues in the 1840s, but
became superintendent of the Pittsburgh
an article from The Pittsburgh Gazette
Public Schools in 2005, he mandated that
Times dated March 10, 1907, states that the first school building in Squirrel Hill was a “little red brick school house” built before 1868 on an old alignment of Forward Avenue that today is Eldridge Street. Both the school and avenue
“Pittsburgh” be put before every Pittsburgh public school’s name so that they all would be listed together in directories. (Roosevelt is the great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, who had a school named after him in Greenfield.)
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