From its opening in 1951, Pamlico County High School’s students walked through hallways in a building that grew and evolved over generations.
But on Sunday, alumni and members of the public poured into the structure for the One Last Walk event, retracing their footsteps once more before the building’s demolition.
District Public Information Officer Elizabeth Harwick said that as transportation improved in the county, the school was founded with the goal of consolidating roughly 30 community schools into one.
PCHS saw its first graduating class in 1952, and from there, the structure continued to grow, adding an auditorium in the late 1950s, a front English hallway in the ’70s, a science addition in the late ’90s and a cafeteria in 2010.
Before Sunday’s event, the high school was quiet. Classrooms were still full of supplies and schoolwork, book reports hung on the walls and whiteboards still displayed their notes. Chairs were stacked and folded tables squeezed the wide hallways.
With a week before the rooms needed to be cleared, it felt like walking through Chornobyl, a preservation of student and teacher life still left behind.
That feeling changed when the public began to trickle in half an hour before the 2 p.m. start time. Soon, the school was flooded with community members ranging from 90-year-olds to recent graduates.
They stopped to sign the library doors, writing their names and year of graduation on the yellow wood, set to be donated to the Pamlico County Historical Association & Museum in Grantsboro.
“It’s very different,” Connie Brinson, class of 1963, said of the parts of the school that were added since she had graduated. Brinson spoke highly of her former teacher Bell Taylor, describing her class as having “contributed the most to my future life.”
She explained that once a week, Taylor offered students the option to speak rather than read, which led to spirited discussions on topics such as the decriminalization of marijuana and whether Marilyn Monroe was wearing underwear.
“The sky was the limit, and she encouraged us to let our minds go,” Brinson said.
Nostalgia permeated the air as old friends exchanged hugs and spoke with former teachers. They bought jerseys, pieces of old gym floor and license plates that said Pamlico Hurricanes, the school mascot.
Many described the visit in the same words as Linda Allen, class of 1973: bittersweet and needing to hold back tears.
Among the familiar faces returning to PCHS was Helen Lee Jones, who entered the school in its first year, 1951, as a junior. She graduated two years later, headed to East Carolina University to study English and business, before moving to Colorado with her husband, where she would live for the next 16 years.
However, in 1972, she returned to Pamlico and began teaching English at the high school.
While Jones recounted her history with the school, she was repeatedly interrupted as former students, young and old, came over to say hi. “I’ve used your class every day,” Robbie Sawyer, class of 1992, told Jones.
Jones recalled her first classroom, which she nicknamed “the swamp” because when it flooded with rainwater, it left an unpleasant smell.
Standing in the last classroom in which she taught, Jones explained that she moved into it when transitioning to teach business, an opportunity she was waiting for while teaching English. The spot opened up when another teacher retired.
At the time, computers were being introduced and she told her students that “they were going to learn this together,” and they did. Jones, who has a sister who also taught at the school, and a sister who taught elsewhere, retired in 1997.
The school’s demolition and construction of a new building that will also include Pamlico County Middle School is funded by a grant. The current middle school had flooded in 2011 and 2018 due to Hurricanes Irene and Florence.
With a budget of just over $67 million, $50 million of the funds come from the Needs Based Public School Capital Fund Grant, with the grant's managers favoring consolidation of the middle school and high school.
Homecoming queen Jennifer Newman said she and her classmates had a different school structure in 1977. “We came here from 10th grade through 12th, because the ninth grade was still somewhere else,” she said. “For a long time, they did not have the ninth grade included in the high school.”
Newman, along with Cheryl Maxine Mattocks, Debbie Jones Latham, James Gibbs Jr., Jackie Miller, Joanne Mason, Nancy Prescott and Christine Moore all attended PCHS and graduated in 1977. Together they laughed as they walked through the school, running into other old friends and recounting their experiences as students, athletes and cheerleaders.
“We had a great class,” Newman said. “We had lots of camaraderie. And you know one thing that I enjoyed, I don't know about other people, but we used to have pep rallies, and I really enjoyed the pep rallies.”
The group of friends has remained close since high school, with a couple of members working for the school, including Debbie Jones Latham, who served as a nutritionist and a bus driver before retiring. “I worked for 29 years without missing a day,” she said.
Soon, the event was over and a voice over the intercom announced that the doors would need to be shut. About a thousand people revisited the high school that they had once known intimately, but now the stillness had returned.
“It has been a fantastic experience,” Harwick said after the school had cleared.
“Here, we're all Hurricanes,” she said. “We've all been Hurricanes since the early ’50s. The complete integration happened in 1969, with voluntary integration starting in ’68. So from the ’70s on, everyone that graduated high school was a Hurricane.”
Demolition is set to begin in a week and the structure will be gone by fall, in time for the start of the next school year in a new building with new traditions.
