History

Doing a walk-around today, I stopped to talk to the priest that lives on the corner near the high school. He looked at the school. "I didn't know that Bolton was ever a junior college."

"I don't know that it was, Father", I replied. All I've ever known was that it was a high school."

"You wait here." he said, and went into the house. He came out in just minute holding a post card. "I've been buying old post cards off Ebay and I found this one recently."

The date on the back of the card, 1927, was one year after the school was built and the title plainly says New Bolton High School and Junior College, Alexandria, LA. The reverse of the card says that "The New Bolton High School and Junior College was finished in 1926 at a cost of 1.25 million dollars." Interesting stuff.

This is, of course, my alma mater and the place where I work today. One interesting bit of trivia about the old school is that what we call the auditorium was once the gymnasium. During the run-up to WWII, the Army hosted what we call the Louisiana Maneuvers. Local tradition has it that the largest room in the parish was the Bolton Gymnasium and that the Army commandeered it for map exercises. The stories I've heard was that Generals Eisenhower and Bradley both stood in that room looking at huge maps of the French coast and conducted map exercises that could be the forerunner for planning of Operation Overlord.