High … and bye: Savanna bids adieu to West Carroll High School

SAVANNA — When the seniors of West Carroll High School in Savanna flung their black graduation caps up in the air in May, it marked the end of an era in the city’s history.

After a few years of trying to figure out how to cope with declining high school enrollment and an aging building, the West Carroll School District has restructured its facilities for the 2025-26 school year. The plan calls for moving classes out of the high school in Savanna to the current middle school building in Mount Carroll, where the middle school classes will be relocated to the district’s primary school in Savanna. It wasn’t an easy decision, as costs toward building repairs have been a hotly contested issue for the school district and taxpayers in recent years, but it came to a head when the West Carroll School Board decided to shuffle the configuration at a Dec. 14 meeting, by a 7-0 vote.

The relocation of high school education away from Savanna this summer will mark the first time since 1880 that there have no classes higher than eighth grade conducted in the city.

The community won’t be alone feeling a sense of loss. The move to shutter the school in Savanna move is just the latest in a string of closures in Carroll County:

• Shannon lost its high school in 1986 with the formation of the Eastland School District, with its high school students moving to Lanark.

• Chadwick’s high school ceased in 1989 with its consolidation with Milledgeville.

• Mount Carroll and Thomson both lost their high schools when West Carroll formed in 2005, with their high school students attending school in Savanna — a consolidation that also meant the end of the former Savanna High School, its Indians nickname and school colors of red and white replaced by the West Carroll Thunder’s green and black.

Though high school education in Savanna will end, the impact its made through the years has left a legacy that’s far reaching — out of this world, in fact.

Among Savanna alumni are Helen Scott Hay (Class of 1886), who played a role in caring for wounded soldiers during World War I in Europe; Wayne King (Class of 1920), whose orchestra entertained music lovers; and Dale Gardner (Class of 1966), who launched his career as an astronaut with two space trips in the early 1980s. Their stories are just three among the thousands that were written in the halls of the high school in Savanna. Not a bad legacy for a school that started out as a few rooms in another building before graduating to a place of its own. Here’s a look back at some of the high school highlights through the years …

Four score and 64 years ago — Lincoln makes room

Savanna, founded in 1828, established its first school in 1836 with Hannah Fuller as its teacher. More schools were established as the river town grew, including Lincoln School, at the southeast corner of Murray and Third streets, in 1869 on the site of a former public square.

Built by local architect David Bowen, the building was described in an 1878 published history of Carroll County as being “a model of architectural beauty and convenience.” This Lincoln School building would serve the community until a new building replaced it on the same site in 1928 (which later became a junior high school and now sits empty).

Until the late 1910s, it wasn’t uncommon for education to stop after the eighth grade, but Savanna residents decided they wanted to reach for higher education. At the time, separate high school buildings were a luxury usually only afforded larger towns, so Savanna’s first high school classes were offered during the 1881-82 school year at Lincoln School, where a only a couple rooms were set aside for high school classes.

Among its first graduates was Helen Scott Hay, who graduated a few years after the first high school classes before embarking on a long and notable career in nursing, in which she would become one of the most honored and decorated American nurses in the world during the first half of the 20th century. An American Red Cross nurse and nursing educator, she worked in Kiev, Ukraine, and Sofia, Bulgaria, during World War I. Among her numerous honors, she was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal by the International Red Cross Society for her contributions. Today, she’s come to be known as “Carroll County’s most famous daughter.”

In 1896, George Pulford represented the school at the annual University of Illinois high school state meet in Urbana (the predecessor to today’s Illinois High School Association state meet). Pulford won the 880-yard walk race — one which racers move at a pace slower than a run — in 3 minutes, 32 seconds. He became the first state champion athlete from Savanna, but he wouldn’t be the last.

A building of their own

As the city grew, so too did high school enrollment, along with the need for a separate building for high school classes. Savanna, like the rest of the nation, was coming to see the importance of a high school education. The city formed a commission in 1900, manned by school board members and superintendent W.S. Wallace, to look into building the city’s first high school, which led a few years later to one being built at the T-intersection of Main and Fifth streets.

After a brief construction delay of about a month, Savanna’s high school held its first classes Nov. 17, 1902, with 125 students.

Wallace would later recall those first day in the 1912 school yearbook: “Can any of those who were present that first morning ever forget it? How roomy it seemed after the old cramped quarters. How the empty rooms resounded to spoken word and the floors were veritable sounding boards. We felt lost, as in a strange city and at first it seemed good to get outdoors and see familiar objects to assure us that we were really in Savanna.”

Having an established high school also allowed its students to take part in team sports with other high schools: the school’s first boys basketball team took the court for the 1902-03 season under coach V.C. Keys; despite losing in three of its four games that season, the program would go 23-7 over the following three years.

Wayne King graduated from Savanna High in 1920 after his family had moved back and forth between Savanna and Texas in years prior. King would later be given the nickname “The Waltz King,” for his style of orchestra music: His band’s signature song was “The Waltz You Saved For Me,” first performed in 1930. He performed regularly into the 1980s.

The school’s first yearbook was published in 1912, and given the name “Annavas,” which is Savanna spelled backwards.

Even though early educators “felt lost,” it wasn’t all that long before they needed to find more space. By the 1920s, the “roomy” high school was getting overcrowded, which led to the construction of an addition to the west of the school in 1923.

The region’s roots in agriculture took hold in 1936 when the school’s Future Farmers of America chapter (later FFA) was established, with Russell Lamoreux as its first faculty sponsor.

Athletic fields opened on Chicago Avenue in 1939, and two significant extra-curricular accomplishments happened during the early 1940s. Alec MacKenzie took first place in IHSA state competitions in original oratory and extemporaneous speaking in 1941, and the high school football team put together back-to-back undefeated eight-win seasons in 1941 and 1942.

Time for a new high school, again

By 1950, Savanna’s population had grown to just over 5,000, and by the mid-50s, overcrowding at the high school was becoming an issue again — but this time, the city was faced with a high school that was more than 50 years old. Would expanding a building that old be feasible, or advisable? The city’s answer was no.

In 1955, voters approved a new building to be constructed at Longmoor Avenue and Cragmoor Street on the northeast side of town. Construction began in the spring of 1956 with completion planned for the middle of the 1957-58 school year. That was the plan, anyway, but a disaster had different ideas.

On April 26, 1957, a fire on the second floor of the old high school put an end to classes in the building and it was torn down shortly thereafter. With the new campus still under construction, classes were moved to local churches, the library and even back at Lincoln School for the final month of the school year. This expedited construction on the new building, and it opened on Sept. 3, 1957, with 332 students attending. The new building was dedicated during an open house Jan. 26, 1958. The new campus also had a football field in the rear of the school, which was later named W.F. Massey Field, in honor of a Savanna High School teacher and coach.

With Russia’s Sputnik giving Americans the jitters, and the space race speeding up, it was in the new school’s science and math classrooms where a future astronaut would learn some of the engineering skills that would help lead him to a career in the Navy and NASA. Dale Gardner served as flight engineer on the Challenger STS-8 research mission in 1983 and mission specialist on the Discovery STS-51-A satellite deployment-and-retrieval mission in 1984. Tough his stay in Savanna was brief — he was born in Minnesota and his family moved to Savanna in 1961, before moving to Clinton, Iowa, shortly after Dale graduated high school in 1966 as valedictorian — his name lives on in the town he called home. The bridge across the Mississippi River linking Savanna to Sabula was named after him in 2018.

The 1966-67 school year saw the school’s second state champion speaker, when Stephen Baldridge won first place in prose reading.

In 1975, the Savanna Park District opened an indoor pool attached to the school building.

Of all of the sports at Savanna High, it was in wrestling where the Indians achieved the most success. In all, 19 state championships were won by 16 wrestlers, and 36 additional wrestlers earned state medals from 1959 to 2003. Under coach Charles Anderson, state championships were won six times, in 1974-75, 1977-79 and 1982, all under a system where results from the state’s individual finals determined the state champion.

As the city moved ahead into the ‘80s and 90s, the economy had a hard time keeping up. The community’s bottom line took a hit with the closure of the Milwaukee Road rail yard in the early 1980s and that of the Savanna Army Depot in the late 1990s. People were leaving the city and taking students with them. Savanna wasn’t the only place in Carroll County feeling a pinch: Mount Carroll and Thomson also saw declining enrollment as the 20th century drew to a close.

New district, same high school

The seeds of West Carroll High School began with the West Carroll Thunder football cooperative of Savanna, Mount Carroll and Thomson high schools in 2003. At the time, Savanna’s football team had been in a long losing streak of more than 60 games going back to 1995, but broke that streak in Week 2 of the 2003 season with a 49-14 win over Warren/River Ridge.

The West Carroll name would be applied to a new school district formed when Savanna, Mount Carroll and Thomson consolidated in 2005, with the high school classes remaining in Savanna. The Savanna Indians, Mount Carroll Hawks, and Thomson Trojans took their place in the history books, and a new name roared in: the West Carroll Thunder.

Mount Carroll and Thomson’s losses would be Savanna’s gain. With the consolidation of high-schoolers from three towns came success in extracurricular activities over the next two decades. Among the most notable:

• The boys basketball and softball teams qualified for the IHSA state finals in 2007 and 2009, respectively.

• The FFA chapter saw a handful of its students win state championships in leadership events, with a group win in novice parliamentary procedure in 2014.

• The Thunder had 14 top-three state placings by the school’s musicians in the IHSA sweepstakes competition, including state championships from 2010-13 in Class B and 2017 in Class C.

• Most recently, Emma Randecker became the first state track champion to hail from Savanna schools in 126 years, when the West Carroll junior sprinter won first place in the Class 1A 100-meter dash in 2024.

Nearly 470 students attended West Carroll High School when it was formed in 2005, but as enrollment and population declines continued throughout the western half of the county, that number dropped to about 260 today, the final year of classes at the Savanna High School building, just a few years shy of its 70th birthday.

With high school classes moving to Mount Carroll next school year, things will switch from 2005: Now, Savanna’s loss will become Mount Carroll’s gain, with the city becoming home to high school classes again for the first time in 20 years. Meanwhile the high school building in Savanna awaits its future plans — whatever they may be — marking an end to 143 years of high school education in Savanna.

But maybe, if you listen closely, you can still hear the echoes of those empty rooms of the past resounding with the sound of students reaching for a higher education — a nurse who earned her wings and reached new heights as an angel of mercy, a King who reached into people’s soles and got them to dance, and a traveler who reached for the stars. They, and countless others who roamed the halls and filled the classrooms, helped write the history book of Savanna’s high schools.