The first students walked through the doors of the newly constructed Pottsville Area High School building Jan. 3, 1933.
On Thursday, exactly 80 years later, the student body gathered in the school's Robert W. Wachter Auditorium.
School officials and alumni delivered speeches, reminisced and sang the school's alma mater, "Old High," in celebration of the building's eight decades as a center of secondary education.
"The present high school building, our castle on the hill, is an up-to-date school plan, just as it was when it opened as a million-dollar school 80 years ago," Superintendent Jeffrey S. Zwiebel, a 1986 graduate, said. "It is a far cry from Pottsville's very first high school."
According to newspaper archives, the first public school in Pottsville was established in 1811. City officials in the 19th century started to consider a high school in 1847, and one was established in April 1853 with 30 pupils in a room on the second floor of the old Bunker Hill school house.
Over the years, the site changed and, on Feb. 12, 1868, a new high school building opened in the old Academy building on West Norwegian Street with 14 pupils.
High school was conducted at the Jackson Street building from February 1876 until it was taken to the new Garfield School building in 1894, then to the Patterson building at 12th and Market streets in 1916.
The Patterson building accommodated 1,169 high school and elementary students.
Zwiebel said that with enrollment on the rise, school officials considered multiple options for expansion, and in December 1930, the public voted 2,449 to 1,521 in favor of a $900,000 loan to build the present high school.
"Today, the cost to build a building of this grandeur could be tens of millions of dollars if not $100 million and Pottsville did it for a million 80 years ago," Zwiebel said.
Today, Pottsville Area High School has about 1,100 students enrolled.
Following Zwiebel, librarian Lillian Hobbs presented a slide show. She said that the stadium was built as a works progress administration project.
She said that the stadium is constructed with sand from the gutters, native stone from old homes and stone from an old city post office. The admission gates are from jail cells in old city hall and at one time there was a red cinder track from which the cinders came from a burning mine near Minersville.
"We recycled even back then," Hobbs said.
Hobbs said the stadium seats 12,000 and the first football game was played there in 1932.
In 1938, the stadium was the most packed it had ever been, in a game against Hazleton that drew 16,942 spectators.
Hobbs also said the school seal, still used, was designed by Marshall Moyer in a contest, for which he won a $5 prize; and while now known as the Crimson Tide, at one time the school mascot was the Bulldogs.
High school Principal Tiffany Reedy then talked about what she thought makes the Pottsville Area High School building feel like home - the people and traditions.
"Penny-A-Week is almost as old as this building itself," she said. The annual collection provides local families with holiday gifts.
In showing that the people are what makes the school the home it is, there was a slide show presentation with Pottsville graduates who are now part of the faculty and staff.
At the end of the assembly, before all of the 47 alumni were called on stage to lead the school in the singing of the alma mater, Charles Wagner, an alumnus, a member of the school board and the former high school principal, had a few words.
"I am fortunate to have been the son of a Pottsville Area graduate, a Pottsville Area graduate myself, an employee of the Pottsville Area School District for over 35 years, principal of this building during part of that time and now I serve on the Pottsville Area school board," Wagner said. "I don't say this lightly, but I am Pottsville proud."
He told students that graduates have gone on to be successful in all walks of life and if you talk to them, they will owe a great deal of that success to what they learned in the halls of "The Castle on the Hill."
Wagner said someday all the students in the audience will realize that same pride and they should always remember where they came from and who they are.
Talking further about the building, he said that while the school was projected to last 25 years and maybe 50 years maximum, it's still here 80 years later, having changed over the years to accommodate the changes in education.
"This fine old lady of a building has evolved with the times," Wagner said. "Our building is functioning superbly in the 21st century."
The celebration was also supposed to feature Mary Spehrley, 97, of Pottsville, as a guest speaker, but Reedy said she was ill and could not attend.
According to newspaper archives, Spehrley was part of the first class to graduate from the building in 1933.