Lincoln School, Huntsville Alabama

Date added: October 24, 2023 Categories: Alabama School

Lincoln School was erected in 1929 by Lincoln Mills of Alabama which became one of the largest textile mills in Huntsville. It was located just north of the city limits and typified the paternalistic mill system which provided for all the needs of its employees. Lincoln Village was a self-contained community of housing, stores, community hall, churches, school, and mill buildings, all owned by the company. Although Lincoln School was a company school attended by the children of the operatives, it was staffed and administered through the Madison County Board of Education. When the mill finally closed, the school was sold to the Huntsville City Board of Education which has operated it since then as a city school. Lincoln School has been in continuous use since 1929 and is the oldest school building in the city, as well as the only mill school still functioning.

Lincoln Mills of Alabama was incorporated in 1918 when William Lincoln Barrell of Lawrence, Massachusetts, purchased a small bankrupt textile company, Abingdon Mill, which had begun in 1900 as Madison Spinning Company. A small, two-story brick school was constructed about 1921 for the children of the operatives. However, the great period of growth for the mill took place during the latter 1920s when an extensive expansion program was undertaken which increased the size of the mill complex to 750,000 square feet. With the expansion of the manufacturing plant came the development of Lincoln Village when more than 500 cottages were constructed to house the additional employees needed to work in the new mills. As a result, the first school building was soon overcrowded, and in 1929 the new school opened immediately behind the first which was then razed. According to county board records, the new school and its equipment cost $60,000.

Although the mill owned the building, the school was operated by the Madison County Board of Education which hired the teachers and supervised administrative matters. The mill contributed the salaries of a full-time music teacher and a janitor and supplied the heat for the building, which was pumped from the mills through underground pipes.

Lincoln School opened with grades 1 through 9 and added one grade each year, with its first senior class graduating in 1935. In 1952 the three upper classes were assigned to a new high school, and in 1960 the junior high grades were zoned to another school, leaving Lincoln with grades 1 through 6. By this time Lincoln was part of the city school system and had ceased to be a mill school. The sixth grade was transferred to a middle school in 1975, so that Lincoln now functions purely as an elementary school offering kindergarten through the fifth grade.

While Lincoln was a mill school, it placed a heavy emphasis on music as evidenced by the presence of a full-time music teacher, and its glee clubs and quartets won nearly every competition. Spelling, government fundamentals, oratorial contests and public speaking were stressed, and extra-curricular activities included a dramatics club and two literary societies. The school also supported basketball and football teams and even published two yearbooks, one in 1935 and the other in 1946.

Although Lincoln School continues to serve the pupils of Huntsville, Lincoln Mill ceased operation in the 1950s, and the mill complex was purchased in 1957 by the Huntsville Industrial Associates which leased it to the aerospace industries which held NASA contracts. Most of these companies later moved to quarters in Research Park, and the HIC building (as the mill came to be called) was rented by a variety of small local businesses. On the morning of February 19, 1980, four of the six mill buildings were destroyed by fire.

Building Description

Lincoln School is a rectangular, three-story, monolithic cast-in-place, heavily-reinforced concrete mill village structure with the same materials and detailing as the late 1920s mill whose village it was built to serve. These mills and mill village structures are said to have been designed by an English amateur engineer. The designer's amateur status seems to be confirmed by the considerable oversizing of the structural elements and the absence of any expansion joints in the over 600-foot long nearby mill buildings. Amateurs tend to oversize structural elements, and it does not seem conceivable that a professionally trained engineer would omit something as basic as expansion joints in a long building. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Lincoln School could probably be rolled end-over-end without significant damage, since it is a cellular structure in which all planes are heavy reinforced concrete.

Lincoln School has three stories, with the ground floor depressed about three feet below grade to reduce the climb up to the twin entry porticoes at the mid (main) floor. The central portion of the facade is raised about six feet higher than the flanking wings to produce both a high ceiling at the third-floor central auditorium and a central visual emphasis to the facade.

The front and back walls are almost entirely glass, with windows of large-panel, divided light, steel projected industrial sashes, apparently original. The large windows are separated only by alternating concrete pilaster columns and mullions, about three feet and two feet wide respectively. The concrete pilaster columns are rusticated with deep-formed square reveals to produce an effect of masonry. The concrete spandrels below the windows have recessed rectangular panels with small quarter-circle inset corners for a faintly classical effect. The classical idea is carried through at the concrete porticoes which each have two pairs of concrete columns of a vaguely Tuscan design. (These same columns occur on a small structure at the adjacent Lincoln Mills.) The porticoes and the main walls are topped by parapets with concrete caps with raised portions directly above each pilaster column; these parapets seem to function as abstracted classical balustrades where the balusters have become a solid capped wall and the piers are simply a raised portion of the wall. The design idea is apparently an industrial version of Beaux-Arts classicism. Recently about half of the windows were closed with insulated stucco panels when air conditioning was installed in the building.

The flat roofs are composed of asphalt, felt, and gravel and concealed behind the parapets. The portico roof drainage consists of a pipe cast into the center of one of the columns at each portico.

Concrete steps with concrete-capped cheek-walls ascend to the porticoes, while side steps descend about three feet to the ground floor entry areaways under the porticoes. The narrow yard between the porticoes is fenced from the driveway by heavy concrete posts strung through with a heavy iron chain, said by an elderly former student to be original to the school building.

While the front and rear facades are mostly glass, the end walls contain only one small window centered on each floor which is used to ventilate the restrooms. The concrete panels are inset at the end walls where windows and spandrels would occur, thus carrying through the facade pattern of pilaster columns, mullions, belt-courses, parapets and spandrel panels.

All of the rooms have thick reinforced concrete floors, walls, and ceilings as their original finished surface. Most rooms now have post-1950 types of acoustically absorbent suspended fiber ceiling tiles, and asphalt or vinyl-asbestos tile floors. The auditorium retains what may be the original incandescent lights, although most rooms have more recent fluorescent fixtures. All the restrooms were rebuilt after 1960.

Each floor features a long central hallway terminating in a restroom at each end and flanked by rows of identical classrooms. Only the third floor varies from this arrangement since the large auditorium occupies the center of this level. The stage is in excellent original condition, but the seating has been removed, and the auditorium is now used principally as a library. One rear corner has been enclosed by temporary, eight-foot-high partitions to create a room approximately twenty feet square. There are two stairways, one at each end opposite the entrances; they too are constructed of solid concrete.

Other alterations to the school include moving the small principal's office to a main floor classroom and converting three basement classrooms into a cafeteria in 1948. Otherwise, the school survives in remarkably original condition.

The school was originally surrounded by a tall chain-link fence which was locked each night at 8. Today only the concrete posts marking the rear and south gates remain.