Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School

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Listed in the National Register of Historic Places

Hume-Fogg High School, built from 1911 to 1917, stands on the site of the city’s first school. It is named for Alfred Hume and B.J. Fogg, important educators in the early development of public education in Nashville. Architects William B. Ittner of St. Louis and Robert S. Sharp of Nashville designed this block-long four-story stone building in the Collegiate Gothic style, a turn-of-the-century architectural movement that began with the campuses at Princeton, Yale, and Duke universities. Over the main Broadway entrance is a set of cut stone figures symbolizing the classical curriculum taught at the school since the 1930s: literature, composition, science, mathematics, domestic arts, instrumental drawing, and fine arts. Hume-Fogg became an academic magnet school in the 1980s, and in 2008 and 2009, Newsweek magazine ranked the school in the top 30 of public high schools nationally. Some of Hume-Fogg’s most famous alumni include poet and literary critic Randall Jarrell (1931), actress and singer Dinah Shore (1934); Academy-Award-winning director Delbert Mann (1938); and model and actress Bettie Page (1940).