Then and Now: Carroll County’s first high school graduates, 1917

The “new” Conway Village Grammar School, built on the old school lot beside the then-Congregational church on Main Street in 1886, originally accommodated students through the eighth grade. In 1912, the building was jacked up and moved to the back of the lot near Pequawket Pond, and two rooms were added to the rear. That yielded six fairly large classrooms, and each year thereafter one extra grade was added. The last grade started classes in 1916, and in June of 1917, eight Conway Village students became the first in Carroll County to graduate from “an approved first class high school.”

They were the Class of 1917, but what did they call their alma mater? The high school grades seemed to require something other than “Conway Village Grammar School.” The community eventually applied different names to each floor of the school, calling the first level Conway Grammar School and the upper story Conway High School, but that nomenclature appears to have been largely informal.