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Gibsonville High School — Gibsonville, North Carolina

Posted by DaveSanders | North Carolina | Posted on February 5th, 2010

Gibsonville, N. C.

Gibsonville High School was located in Gibsonville, NC. The town of Gibsonville was chartered in 1871 and is almost evenly split between Alamance and Guilford counties.

There are a bunch of Gibsonville photos on Flickr.com (all may not be Gibsonville, N. C.).

Here’s the website for the Town of Gibsonville.

Gibsonville High School

mascot: Yellow Jackets
colors: Yellow & Black

I wasn’t able to find a history of Gibsonville High School. I don’t know when it opened, but I found an obituary of a man who graduated from there in 1918. For most (all?) of its life, Gibsonville School housed all twelve grades. The only thing I could find about the school colors was somebody that described it as “that awful mustard yellow”. Since the other 9,999 schools with Yellow Jackets or Yellowjackets as their mascot have colors of Yellow & Black, I went with that for the colors.

Below is sort of a hodge-podge of information I found about Gibsonville High School. If you have more/better info, please leave us a comment. Better yet, I’m sure there’s an alumnus out there who could write a history of the school. Write it up and we’ll post it here!

A 1915 report of N.C schools shows Gibsonville with a white school-age population of 431 children, but only 275 were enrolled in school and the daily average attendance was only 216. The school had 6 white teachers and 2 black teachers (7 women, 1 man). The black children were apparently counted with the rural Guilford County schools. They showed a school-age population of 2,926 with 2,152 enrolled in school, but only 1,505 attended school on an average day.

A 1924 city map (large pdf) shows “Gibsonville Central School” on Church Street at Joyner and Gibsonville Colored School about 1000 feet northwest of the intersection of S. Railroad Ave. & Cayuga (off the map).

Around 1938, somebody took a movie camera and filmed people working, playing and attending school in Gibsonville. The 10-minute YouTube video shows the entire student body of Gibsonville School filing past for the camera. If you’re from Gibsonville, you should recognize places in the background.

A 1961 report states that Gibsonville School held 835 students in grades K-12 with 30 teachers.

 
The annual yearbook was called the YELL-O-JAK.
(May Memorial Library in Burlington has a collection of Gibsonville High School yearbooks.)

The last class graduated from Gibsonville High School in 1974. I couldn’t determine if the building continued to house elementary or middle school grades. Someone reported that the building was demolished in 2005 or 2006, but this is another place I got confused. This Google Street View of Gibsonville Elementary School looks very similar to the school in the 1938 movie. Am I confusing two different buildings?

There’s an active Gibsonville High School group on Facebook.

Everyone I saw on Facebook who had to change schools in 1974 graduated from Eastern Guilford High School. EGHS opened in 1974. Was it a replacement for Gibsonville? Did other schools consolidate with Gibsonville to form EGHS? (I saw a reference that said Guilford County, Greensboro and High Point schools were consolidated in 1992. How was that related to EGHS? Just curious.)

(This has nothing to do with Gibsonville High School, but Gibsonville alumni might find it interesting. Eastern Guilford High School was destroyed by fire in 2006. The students were split up by grades and attended classes in various locations for the remainder of 2006. From the Fall of 2006 through most of 2009, they attended school in a “pod village” which was a bunch of pre-fab buildings temporarily set up on the school grounds. Their new school building was finally ready in May of 2009 and students moved in when they returned from Spring Break. Here’s some photos taken during and after the fire.)

There are about 275 Gibsonville High School alumni on Classmates.com.

Gibsonville native Kay Yow (Class of ’60) was an all-state player at GHS, once scoring 52 points in a game. After college, she coached for 4 years at Allen Jay and one year at Gibsonville High School, posting a combined 92-27 record. Between 1975 and 2005, she coached over 1,000 games at NC State. She is enshrined in the Guilford County Sports Hall of Fame, the Raleigh Hall of Fame, the N.C. Sports Hall of Fame, the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame and the national Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Kay died in January, 2009 after a long battle with breast cancer. Both of Kay’s parents had played basketball at Gibsonville. Both of her sisters were exceptional players for Gibsonville High School and went on to successful athletic careers. Debbie Yow was inducted into the Guilford County Sports Hall of Fame in 2007. Debbie coached at Kentucky and Florida before becoming the Athletic Director at the University of Maryland. Susan was a 2-time collegiate All-American, coached in the WNBA and has been a successful college head coach at several colleges.
Here’s the audio of an interview with Kay Yow.

Fred Wagoner (Class of ’40) was inducted into the National 4-H Hall of Fame in 2008.

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