3102 S 59TH ST, TACOMA

File
3-28-1910

One of 14 technical drawings for the Edison School Annex, created by Frederick Henry Heath on March 28, 1910. Renamed in 1912 to the Barlow Annex after South Tacoma community activist Orin Watts Barlow. The structure was demolished in 2011.

Frederick Henry Heath was born in LaCrosse, Wisconsin in 1861 and graduated from Powell's Academy, a parochial institution created by Rev William R. Powell in Caledonia, Minnesota. Heath moved to Tacoma in 1893 and formed a partnership with Ambrose James Russell and A. Walter Spaulding in 1901. It was during this partnership that Heath would become the School Architect for the Tacoma School District from 1903 through 1920, when he had moved on to partner with George Gove and draftsman Herbert A. Bell as Heath, Gove & Bell. Towards the end of his life, Heath collaborated with his son Frederick Jr. to help promote and sell his invention, "Heath Cubes," a square, hollow tile building material.

D48345-1

Item
1950-03-08

Part of Richards Studio Photographs

The students of Edison Elementary School stand in front of and peer out the windows of Gray Junior High's Barlow annex on March 8, 1950. Edison Elementary was badly damaged by the big 1949 earthquake, but the full extent of the damages was not realized until engineering studies were completed in February 1950. The school was condemned and ordered closed. With their school suddenly closed, the 540 Edison students had to attend classes in the Gray Jr. High annex - in double shifts. At Edison, the children had filled nineteen classrooms. In the annex building, they were squeezed into nine classrooms with half attending 8 a.m.- 12:15p.m., and the second shift attending 12:30p.m. - 4:45p.m. The children peering from the windows are about to leave, to make way for the second shift waiting outside. (TNT 3/10/1950 pg. 4)

Gray Junior High School (Tacoma); Public schools--Tacoma; School children--Tacoma--1950-1960; Edison Elementary School (Tacoma); Earthquakes--Tacoma;