Read time: 10 min.

I did so many stupid things during my first year of college that it’s hard to believe those foolish and formative days once represented the entirety of my world. Fortunately, I get occasional reminders of something smart I did back then, like finding photos I took of Fort Wayne’s old Elmhurst High School. I’m glad I took them, because the building no longer exists.

I never set foot in Elmhurst and only learned about the place after moving to Fort Wayne. My scholarship to IPFW didn’t cover housing, so I rented an apartment and managed the night shift at the Subway on Goshen Road to pay for it. Two of my co-workers were attending their final year of classes as officials threatened to close the place, and it seemed like the school was on WANE-TV or FOX 55 every day.

Fort Wayne Community Schools was faced with a $15 million budget shortfall when I lived there. You wouldn’t have known it as an outsider, though: aside from being the largest district in Indiana, FWCS is one of the best at investing in its historic facilities. Central High School, now home to the district’s career center, was built in 1902. South Side High School was completed twenty years later, and North Side followed in 1927.

Northrop and Wayne were completed in 1971, and then there was Elmhurst. My friends at work told me the school was aging, but I didn’t realize it had stood at the corner of Ardmore Avenue and Sand Point Road for eighty-one years. I wanted to learn more about the historic structure on the chopping block! Eventually, I did.

Before Elmhurst was built, Section 20 of Wayne Township was home to the District 5 schoolhouse¹, commonly known as Fox². It’s still standing today at the southeast corner of Ardmore and Sand Point. The need for a high school to serve the unincorporated areas southwest of Fort Wayne became apparent by the 1920s. Work on Elmhurst and a similar school, Hillcrest, commenced in 1929.

Hillcrest was completed on time for $120,000. Unfortunately, construction paused at the eleven-room Elmhurst building after workers found crumbling mortar between its bricks. Students scheduled to attend classes at the $175,000 structure enrolled at Hillcrest until Elmhurst opened in time for the 1931 school year³.

Elmhurst and Hillcrest looked nearly identical. Rising two stories, the t-shaped structures featured projecting entry bays framed by columns and stone lintels. The primary difference was their color: Elmhurst featured a buff brick facade, but Hillcrest used darker clinker bricks that were highly regarded for their aesthetics after the turn of the twentieth century⁴.

The similarities ended in 1943 when Elmhurst was expanded as part of a Federal Works Agency project. The new addition more than doubled the school’s footprint and featured five classrooms, an industrial arts room, service rooms, and a cafeteria⁵.

Completed under the tenure of Wayne Township Trustee Walter F. Hayes, the addition was attached to the original structure by a two-story hallway. The building stayed symmetrical, but the northern wing was dominated by a block entrance and porthole windows that made little attempt to hide its modernity.

Additions and expansions played an enormous part in Elmhurst’s viability over its seventy-nine years in operation. In 1956 or 1957, a single-story row of classrooms, a new entrance, and a hipped-roof gymnasium were added to the building’s northwest side along Sand Point Road⁶. The mighty Elmhurst Trojans played there for more than half a century.

Along with the Hillcrest, Maplewood, Waynedale, and Anthony Wayne schools, Elmhurst became part of Fort Wayne’s metropolitan school district in 1958⁷. Seven years later, a $1.3 million expansion added new classrooms, labs, and a library to the building’s southwest side⁸.

The last major addition to Elmhurst began in 1977 when a 600-seat auditorium and auxiliary gym were erected at the west side of the school⁹. Unfortunately, that treatment stood in contrast to Fort Wayne’s other high schools: Northrop and Wayne came online, then South Side was modernized in 1981 and 1996. North Side underwent a dramatic expansion in 2004.

Unfortunately, Elmhurst was left in the lurch. My friends at work told me about the school’s elderly drinking fountains, its old-school clocks and chalkboards, and the building’s convoluted layout as we made Italian BMT’s for people who would have rather gone to Quizno’s. Their opinions made it sound like Elmhurst was going to be shuttered, so I decided to go see it for myself.

That’s how I have these photos. I arrived at Elmhurst on a blustery Saturday afternoon at a time when my love of local history was blossoming. My esoteric interests always set me apart from my friends in school, but a current events presentation in my speech class provided the perfect opportunity to put my photos to use in front of my peers.

I spent time taking simple photos of Elmhurt’s north, east, and west facades before I painted my case for the school’s preservation with broad brush strokes of pathos. My argument wasn’t sophisticated, but I detailed the school’s rich history, compared its facilities with Fort Wayne’s other high schools, and talked about the regional identity of southwestern Fort Wayne.

I acknowledged the difficulties of keeping it open but, in the end, wound up endorsing preservation. I earned an A, but the bar was low: my presentation was sandwiched between one that consisted of an interpretive dance routine set to “Tik-Tok” by Ke$ha and another about transferring to IPFW from the “Ivy League route” of Ivy Tech across the street.

A couple months after my speech, the trustees of Fort Wayne Community Schools unanimously voted to close Elmhurst and an elementary school, Pleasant Center, in an attempt to make up a $15 million budget shortfall¹⁰. Both my coworkers were part of its last graduating class. One, sort of an outcast, was ambivalent. The other, an award-winning volleyball player, was more upset.

The community was devastated. There were protests, but the decision was final. In 2012, I was heartened to learn that sixteen former Trojans clad in caps and gowns of the Northrop Bruins, the North Side Redskins, the South Side Archers, and the Wayne Generals were given the change to pose for a graduation photo in front of the abandoned building’s steps¹¹. 

All told, Elmhurst sat empty for years before Hanson Aggregate bought the fifteen-acre property. The company began operating its Ardmore Quarry in 1929, the same year construction started on the school, but determined that the building was impossible to save¹². Officials allowed alumni and stakeholders to tour the building a final time, and demolition began in 2018.

The hallway between the language arts classrooms and the auditorium was the first to go. The south side followed, then the north side fell. The 1929 and 1943 facades remained as the bulldozers edged closer, but all that’s left of Elmhurst High School today is its foundation. As it turns out, the school was built on a pocket of hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous gas¹³!

I don’t know why I felt so strongly about a school I never entered, but Elmhurst’s demolition hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m glad I took my photos, but I’m less enthusiastic about my stewardship of them. I can’t help but chuckle at the myriad of questionable decisions that defined that chapter of my life, but one was not bothering to save my original image files. I really wish I had.

I still have compressed and reduced versions, though, and I completely forgot about them until a few weeks ago. There’s no doubt that other people did a better job documenting Elmhurst, but my pictures serve as a testament to a year of impulsive choices that yielded unexpected treasures fourteen years later.

They might not be great, but I hope my pictures lead some former Trojans stumble across this post. Their memories could help fill in my missing pixels! More than buildings, I’ve come to realize that schools are entities that rely on the spirit of the people who one walked through their halls. In some form or another, that spirit will let Elmhurst High School continue to stand for a long time into the future.

Sources Cited
1 Standard atlas of Allen County, Indiana (1898). George A. Ogle & Co. [Chicago]. Map.
2 Four Principals Are Announced (1929, August 28). The Fort Wayne News-sentinel. p. 13.
3 Work Resumed On School (1930, August 28). The Fort Wayne News-Sentiel. p. 3. 
4 VanHecke, S. (n.d.) The Accidental Charm of Clinker Bricks. Old House Journal. Web. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
5 Anlibrum (1943). Elmhurst High School [Fort Wayne]. Yearbook. 
6 Anlibrum (1957). Elmhurst High School [Fort Wayne]. Yearbook.
7 Public Schools Grow with City (1958, July 21). The Fort Wayne News Sentinel. p. 34.
8 Anlibrum (1965). Elmhurst High School [Fort Wayne]. Yearbook.
9 Anlibrum (1977). Elmhurst High School [Fort Wayne]. Yearbook.
10 Kuzmicz, B. (2010, March 26). Elmhurst High School Closing June 2010. The Waynedale News. Web. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
11 Always a Trojan (2012, July 27). The Waynedale News. Web. Retrieved December 13, 2023. 
12Hanson Aggregates Purchases Elmhurst High School Property (2017, September 1). The Waynedale News. Web. Retrieved December 10, 2023.
13 Cornwell, C. (2018, May 25). Elmhurst is Coming Down But Memories Remain. The Waynedale News [Fort Wayne]. Web. Retrieved December 10, 2023.