Old School: HS names from Guilford County’s past

Gibsonville Yellow Jackets….Allen Jay Jaybirds….Greensboro Senior Whirlwinds….

Just a few names from the past and some of the old schools aren’t even around any more, but Gibsonville became the Eastern Guilford Wildcats and Greensboro Senior went on to become Grimsley High School and out came the Whirlies and the Allen Jay Jaybirds, flew the coop and merged with another former GCS Sumner, to form the Southern Guilford Indians and now they have gone to become the SG Storm……

The past has some interesting chapters when you pause to consider there were a number of other schools, that were fore-runners for today’s academic institutions….

We had a Bessemer School out off of Bessemer Avenue and I believe they were considered a county school back in the day. There was a Rankin School and they later helped to fill up Northeast Guilford HS. Brown Summit also sent their load over to NEG as did the old McLeansville HS….

It would make for an interesting study to locate and find out what names those old schools used for their nicknames….The Bessemer Bombers????? The Brown Summit Browns????? The Rankin Railroad Spikes????? The McLeansville Mudhens?????

We also had schools located in downtown Pleasant Garden with the old PG High School and when Boren Brick came to town, maybe they went with the name of the PG Bricks, or to make things simplier, maybe they just called themselves the Pleasant Garden Pigs….

Another old school on the Southeast side of town was the Nathaniel Greene HS. They may have been known as the Nats or the Greenies….

Way Out west, on the western side of the county, as you head North by Northwest, you had Colfax, Oak Ridge and Summerfield HS and who can forget the old Stokesdale “Stoke the Fires”; whose players hauled wood and started fires in the families’ wood stoves, so it would be warm at night when they got back from the games. My ancestors used to tell me that the Colfax Collies were a dog-gone good team and that when Oak Ridge came to your small town, they were taller than an Oak tree and that the Oaks were a tough bunch to cut down when they took the ball and headed toward the Summer fields…..

Jamestown had their own school back in the Old School Days and I am not sure what they called themselves, it may have been the “James Gang”, from Jamestown, and later the Ragsdale family made that area famous and had their name attached to nearly everything in town….

Know of any other Old Schools that were in Guilford County?????? This does make for an interesting study hall subject……..

10 thoughts on “Old School: HS names from Guilford County’s past

  1. What about the Aycock Rebels and one of the most successful small high schools in the state, Bessemer Whippets. They had soe great athletes that went to Pembroke State to play baseball.

  2. Andy this is good stuff.
    Let’s try and keep this thing going.
    The only one’s with mascot’s I know for sure are these: Bessemer Whippets, Greensboro Purple whirlwinds,Sumner Indians and Gibsonville Yellow jackets.
    Other small schools I remember hearing about but do not know their mascots : Montecello
    McLeansville
    Rankin
    Brown -Summit
    Sedalia
    Alamance
    Nathaniel Greene
    Pleasant Garden
    Guilford(later WG)
    Colfax
    Stokesdale
    Summerfield
    Jamestown

    All of these would be in existance about 50 years ago.See if you can set up an excel chart on this site and let people that know the mascots for these schools fill in the blanks.

    Example:
    school mascot last year of school
    Rankin 1961-62

  3. I am positive that Guilford High School was the Hornets….Their last year was probaly somewhere around 1968….Ed Carroll would know….He was the assistant principal and in charge of the buses at the old Guilford High Schools and the main man was Henry Walters, who Ronnie Yow(Kay’s younger brother) tells me was at Gibsonville before he came to Guilford….

    Walters was a big golf nutt, back when golfing was considered to be the opera of sports and only for the prolitariate……

    Ronnie Yow is your Gibsonville man…..He knows it all and he was there, his sisters Susan and Debbie were there and Henry Walters, Eddie Flinchum, Fred Yadkin, Tommy Norwood, Elijah Marshall, Donna Holt and many others, who got out before the flood….

  4. Stokesdale High School Blue Devils. Consolidated into NW Guilford in 1962. Jesse Joyce (deceased) was last principal and Duke Bowman (deceased) was last men’s basketball and baseball coach. In 1962 Stokesdale won regular season basketball title, Alamance the Tournament title and Colfax the State 1A Championship. Must have been a pretty good conference.

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