Torrence Lytle School
(ca. 1937)
Opened originally as the segregated Huntersville Colored School for grades 1-11, the Torrence-Lytle School was north Mecklenburg County’s first and only public high school for African American students.
14008 Holbrooks Road, Huntersville, NC 28078
In the 1890s, following the City of Charlotte’s 1880s example, Mecklenburg County began purchasing land and building county public schools, funded primarily by local tax revenues. Lower tax revenues in the county’s rural areas meant fewer available dollars for educational purposes in those communities as opposed to more affluent urban areas. The Jim Crow era practice of racial segregation further complicated efforts to improve education by requiring separate schools for White and African American children. Those additional expenses for already cash-strapped rural communities meant significant disparities in the quality of education between those communities and the county’s urban centers. Supplemental funding to improve public education for southern African Americans was available from northern philanthropists like Sears-Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald. Through collaborative efforts with Tuskegee Institute founder Dr. Booker T. Washington, his Rosenwald Fund built approximately 5,400 rural schools for African American children, including 26 schools in Mecklenburg County. But because the Rosenwald Fund focused its efforts on elementary education, Mecklenburg County likewise limited schooling for its rural African American children to elementary education.
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As a result, when the Torrence-Lytle School opened in 1937, it represented a regional movement to bring high school education to rural African American communities, an effort that included east and west Mecklenburg County as well as Pineville. The Torrence-Lytle School provided African American residents of Pottstown and surrounding north Mecklenburg County neighborhoods with their first opportunity to attend a public high school where they lived. First opened as the Huntersville Colored School, the school was a “union school,” offering grades 1 through 11. The seven-room school housed 181 students and five teachers (three for elementary school, two for high school). Isaac T. Graham served as the school’s only principal from its 1937 opening to its 1966 closing. Renamed in 1953 to honor Isaiah Dale “Ike” Torrence and Franklin Lytle, two men instrumental to the establishment of the school, the Torrence-Lytle School was the only public high school for African Americans in northern Mecklenburg County. As the student body grew, so too did the school grow in size (with more classrooms and facilities in 1952 and 1957) and significance as a center for social gatherings and activities for local Pottstown residents.
The Torrence-Lytle School closed in 1966 in the wake of U.S. Supreme Court rulings declaring segregation unconstitutional. Torrence-Lytle students were reassigned to racially integrated schools, including North Mecklenburg High School. While the building has continued to be used for such purposes as an alternative learning facility and a community recreation center, the school’s closing resulted in the loss of a local institution long cherished by generations of Pottstown and Huntersville residents.