Haverhill High School

Haverhill High School (HHS) is a public high school in Haverhill, Massachusetts, United States. Serving grades 9–12, it is the sole public high school in the Haverhill Public Schools district and offers open enrollment. As of the 2023–2024 school year, the school had an enrollment of 1,991 students.

The origins of public secondary education in the city date to 1841, when the town merged its first public high school with the pre-existing Haverhill Academy. The school occupied several buildings over the following century, including a prominent 1909 building on Main Street that now serves as Haverhill City Hall. The high school moved to its current campus on Monument Street in 1963.

Haverhill High School's athletic teams are known as the Haverhill Hillies and compete in the Merrimack Valley Conference. The school is notable as the alma mater of Archie Comics creator Bob Montana, who used his experiences at the school as the basis for the fictional Riverdale High School.

Haverhill's first public high school was established after the town took over the building of the pre-existing private Haverhill Academy on Winter Street. The building, later known as the Whittier Building, was notable as the place where poet John Greenleaf Whittier had received his advanced schooling. This facility served as the city's high school until population growth rendered it inadequate.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a period of significant prosperity for Haverhill, necessitating the construction of progressively larger high schools. This era was marked by architectural ambition, a devastating fire, and the school's emergence as a pop culture touchstone.

To accommodate the growing student body, a new Haverhill High School was built, opening in September 1874. The three-story building was located on Crescent Place, across from G.A.R. Park. The original site of the school is now a commercial parking lot on what is today Winter Street, following urban renewal projects in the 1970s that realigned local streets.

By the turn of the 20th century, the Crescent Place building was severely overcrowded, leading the city to construct a grand new high school at 139 Main Street. The imposing brick structure was designed by C. Willis Damon, Haverhill's first college-trained architect and a graduate of MIT's architecture program. Construction began in 1908, and the school opened in September 1910. The project cost $350,000 and was designed for 800 students, lauded at the time as one of the region's most well-equipped educational facilities.

With the opening of the Main Street school, the 1874 Crescent Place building was repurposed as the "Haverhill High School Annex" to house the freshman class. The Annex's service ended abruptly in the early morning of Sunday, June 28, 1959, when it was completely destroyed by a five-alarm fire. The blaze, which fire officials suspected was arson, was the first five-alarm fire in the city's modern history and required 250 firefighters from 14 communities to control. The loss of the building, estimated at $250,000, created a severe space crisis and forced the city to expedite plans for a new high school.