A school building once located at the southwest corner of Duke Street and South Quaker Lane was originally known as Lee-Jackson High School. At the time it was constructed in 1925, the school was located in Fairfax County. When it opened for the 1926-27 school year, it was the only high school in the southeastern part of the county and just one of five high schools in the entire county.
Lee-Jackson offered four grades and was accredited two years after it opened. The school’s enrollment and faculty grew from 85 students and four teachers in 1927-28 to 307 students and 10 teachers just eight years later. Students took part in extracurricular activities like boys’ and girls’ basketball, baseball, student government, school patrol, glee club, drama, and ElJay, the Lee-Jackson yearbook.
This image from May 1938 shows students Margaret Eaton (left) and Bernie Linton at Lee-Jackson about a year-and-a-half before Mount Vernon, a new high school, replaced it. Lee-Jackson then served as an elementary school before being acquired in the early 1950s by the City of Alexandria in the West End annexation.
Avoiding confusion with a new elementary school named for Robert E. Lee, Alexandria renamed the old school Stonewall Jackson. It continued as an elementary school and became so crowded that Quonset huts were erected on the grounds for classroom space.
In 1961, a new Stonewall Jackson school building was constructed along Quaker Lane, behind the old one. Though the original structure served briefly as a school for eighth graders, it closed by the end of the 1960s. After it was demolished, a Wendy’s restaurant was built there.
Out of the Attic is provided by the Office of Historic Alexandria.