History

North Little Rock established its high school on a bluff above the Arkansas River as the city grew alongside its neighbor across the river through the early twentieth century. The commission to replace an earlier building with a permanent Art Deco structure went to George R. Mann’s firm, the same practice that had given the state its Capitol and Fort Smith its Masonic Temple. Construction ran from 1928 to 1930, and the completed building projected civic confidence at a moment when the Depression was beginning to constrict ambitions across the country.

The school’s twentieth-century history mirrors the social history of Arkansas. In 1970, during desegregation, the building was renamed Ole Main High School. A 1990 reorganization created East and West campuses. In 2012, voters approved a millage that funded consolidation into a single campus at the 22nd Street site, bringing new gymnasium and athletic facilities alongside the original 1930 building. The historic structure was preserved through this expansion, its Art Deco shell incorporated into the contemporary campus rather than replaced. The National Register listing in 1993 had provided the statutory basis for that preservation decision.

George R. Mann’s two Arkansas Art Deco landmarks—this school and the Fort Smith Masonic Temple, both listed on the NRHP with reference numbers differing by just one digit—demonstrate the range his firm brought to institutional commissions in the region during the late 1920s and early 1930s, from the ceremonial weight of stone Masonic architecture to the civic lightness of brick educational buildings.