Sumner High School (1910)

Sumner High School is a red brick Georgian Revival building whose central pavilion rises to a full pediment set with a wreathed oculus and carried on colossal Ionic pilasters. Between them, three tall arched windows are filled with delicate fan tracery. An octagonal copper cupola — louvered, balustraded, and capped by an ogee dome — crowns the hipped roof, which is broken by a dormered attic story. Brick quoins mark the corners, wrought-iron balconettes front the second floor, and a limestone entrance carries its own small pediment. A large later gymnasium wing of plain brick, its end wall braced by tapering piers and lit by glass block, adjoins the original school.

Sumner High School was founded in 1875 as the first high school for African American students west of the Mississippi River, established after lobbying by St. Louis's Black residents and named for the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner. It opened at Eleventh and Spruce Streets downtown, then moved to a former school building (the 1868 Eliot School) at Fifteenth and Walnut in 1895. In 1910 it moved to this William B. Ittner–designed building in the Ville neighborhood; some accounts date the move to 1908. Sumner remained the only Black public high school in the city until Vashon High School opened in 1927. A normal school for training teachers had operated at Sumner since 1890; it became Stowe Teachers College in 1929 and later merged into Harris–Stowe State University. Frank L. Williams was principal from 1908 to 1929, and the faculty included Edward Bouchet, the first African American to earn a doctorate from an American university, and the zoologist Charles H. Turner. Its graduates include Chuck Berry, Tina Turner, Grace Bumbry, Robert McFerrin, Dick Gregory, Robert Guillaume, Margaret Bush Wilson, and Roscoe Robinson Jr., the first African American four-star general in the United States Army. A tornado damaged the building's roof in May 2025.