You’re looking at Washington-Liberty High School in Arlington. Before 2019, it was Washington-Lee. Before that, in this Library of Congress photograph above, it might not have existed at all.
The Library of Congress dates the picture to 1916 or 1917. The school it shows did not formally open until October 6, 1925. That is an eight-year gap nobody has satisfyingly explained.
The Arlington high school in this picture would later send Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, and Sandra Bullock through its doors. It would also, in January 2019, become one of the most prominent Northern Virginia schools to drop a Confederate name in the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville violence.
Here is the full story, the puzzle and all.
A school named for two universities
In 1922, the citizens of Arlington County voted to issue bonds to build a centrally located high school. According to the school’s official history, it was the first time bond money was used to finance public school construction in Virginia.
Before that vote, Arlington families had limited options. Students who wanted a high school education either crossed the Potomac into Washington, DC, or traveled to George Mason High School in Alexandria’s Del Ray neighborhood. George Mason was the first and only high school in what was then Alexandria County.
The school board adopted the name “Washington-Lee High School” on July 31, 1925. The name was taken directly from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, with one small change.
According to the school’s Generals’ Aide Student Handbook, “the name was taken from Washington and Lee University; however, the ‘and’ was omitted and a hyphen substituted to distinguish one from the other.”
W-L (pronounced “WnL”) adopted a number of the university’s traditions wholesale. The honor code, the Generals mascot, and the original school seal all came directly from Lexington.
The seal itself was designed by Francis David Millet, a Union veteran and artist who was last seen during the sinking of the RMS Titanic, reportedly helping women and children into lifeboats. (Millet was traveling with Major Archibald Butt, whose Washington memorial stands today on the south side of the White House grounds.)
From bond vote to opening day
The construction bonds passed in 1922, but the building was not ready for the 1924-1925 school year. The Arlington school system improvised.
The yet-to-be-named school, sometimes called “the central high school” and sometimes “Ballston High School” by rivals at George Mason, opened on September 24, 1924, scattered across two locations. Students living north of Lee Highway attended classes in the old Cherrydale School building. Students from the Arlington District attended a half-day program at the Ballston School, plus what one source described as “two rooms with attic.”
The actual Washington-Lee building opened a year later, on October 6, 1925. It had cost $200,000 to build, plus another $231,339 for equipment.
When the doors opened that fall, between 450 and 600 students enrolled. Twenty-two teachers were on staff. Samuel P. Vanderslice, Jr. was the first principal, with Geneva Thomas as his assistant.
It was Virginia’s first junior-senior high school, covering grades 7 through 12. The original three-story Colonial Revival building looked out across an open athletic field, the site of today’s Arlington War Memorial Stadium. The school grew so fast that by 1930, just five years after the doors opened, the building had already expanded once.
The 1916-1917 photograph puzzle
Now back to that opening image.
The Library of Congress catalog dates this picture to “[between 1916 and 1917]” and identifies it as the National Photo Company’s image of “Keefer, Washington & Lee High School, Clarendon, Va.” The reproduction number is LC-DIG-npcc-32881. The original call number is LC-F82-2059.
The trouble is, by the school’s own history, no Washington-Lee High School existed in 1916 or 1917. The bond vote was still five years away.
The name would not be formally adopted by the school board until 1925. Arlington children were still riding into the District or down to Alexandria for high school.
So what is actually in the picture?
One theory is that the LOC date is wrong. National Photo Company negatives are often given approximate date ranges based on adjacent batch numbers, not on individual records.
Negative 32881 could have been shot in 1924 or 1925 when the school was new and the company was hired to document it. The “Keefer” label may refer to the photographer, the contractor, or the commissioning client.
A second theory is that there was an earlier frame schoolhouse in Clarendon that locally went by “Washington & Lee” before the name was made official, and that this picture preserves it. The official W-L timeline does not acknowledge one. Arlington County was small and informal in the 1910s, and informal naming was common.
Neither theory is conclusive. Either way, the photograph is one of the more interesting puzzles in Arlington school history, hiding in plain sight in the Library of Congress catalog.
Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Sandra Bullock, and the rest of the W-L alumni
By the 1950s, Washington-Lee was Arlington’s flagship public high school, and it sent a surprising number of its students to Hollywood.
Shirley MacLaine graduated from W-L in 1952. She was a cheerleader at the school before going on to Broadway, then to the Best Actress Oscar awarded in March 1984 for her 1983 role in Terms of Endearment, then to a long list of additional Oscar nominations.
Her younger brother followed three years later. Warren Beatty graduated in 1955. He played football for the Generals, and his classmates remember him as one of the team’s standouts before he reinvented himself as one of Hollywood’s most enduring leading men.
Almost three decades after Beatty, Sandra Bullock walked the same halls. She graduated in the W-L class of 1982 after a high school career that included varsity cheerleading and involvement in the school’s drama and theater productions. Bullock was born in Arlington but spent much of her childhood in Fürth, West Germany, where her American mother performed as an opera singer, before her family settled back in Arlington.
Bullock went on to East Carolina University and, eventually, to the 2010 Best Actress Oscar for The Blind Side. Her yearbook photos and student-life details are well documented on Classmates and in vintage yearbook coverage from outlets like Snakkle.
Plenty of less-famous-but-still-notable alumni round out the roster. Western actor Forrest Tucker graduated with the W-L class of 1938. Opera tenor Carl Tanner was born in Arlington in 1962 and went through the school on his way to international opera stages.
According to Washington-Liberty’s own count, the alumni list includes Oscar, Emmy, and Tony winners on the entertainment side, plus Nobel, Pulitzer, Olympic, World Series, and Super Bowl honorees in other fields.
A note on two names you will sometimes see linked to W-L incorrectly: Roberta Flack and Katie Couric.
Flack grew up in Arlington but attended Hoffman-Boston High School, the only school in the county that admitted African American students at the time. Couric, who graduated in 1975, went to Yorktown High School across town. Neither belongs on the W-L alumni list, despite plenty of online sources getting it wrong.
The 2019 name change to Washington-Liberty
Washington-Lee was named after two generals: George Washington and Robert E. Lee. The “Lee” reference lasted almost a century before community pressure ended it.
The catalyst was the August 2017 white-supremacist march in Charlottesville and the killing of a counter-protester, which forced school districts across Virginia to reexamine Confederate names and symbols. In Arlington, the school board appointed a 21-member renaming committee that included students, alumni, parents, and staff.
In December 2018, the committee recommended “Washington-Loving” as the new name. It would have honored Mildred and Richard Loving, the interracial Virginia couple whose 1967 Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, struck down state laws banning interracial marriage. The Loving name had the added appeal of preserving the W-L initials.
On January 10, 2019, the Arlington School Board met to vote. A motion to adopt “Washington-Loving” failed 2 to 3.
The board then voted on “Washington-Liberty,” the committee’s second-place choice. That motion passed 5 to 0.
The Washington Post covered the meeting that night and described community reaction as divided, with some alumni standing up to object to both the process and the result. Other parents and students applauded the change. The new name became official on July 1, 2019.
The “W-L” initials and the “WnL” nickname survived the change intact. Students and staff adopted updated school colors and logos in the months after the vote.
As the school’s official history now puts it, “as institutions around the country reevaluated names and symbols, a public process in 2018 helped to craft a new school name that would respect the school’s rich history and inspire future generations of students.”
Washington-Liberty High School today
The original 1925 school is long gone. Arlington County demolished it in 1975-1976 and replaced it with a building designed by Ward Associates. That 1976 building was itself replaced during the 2006-2009 campus rebuild that produced the current Washington-Liberty High School complex. The 2019 name change followed a decade later, on the campus that had already been rebuilt.
The current Washington-Liberty High School sits at 1301 North Stafford Street in Arlington, bounded by North Quincy Street and Washington Boulevard. The campus serves more than 2,000 students and, despite the demolition, still looks out toward the same Arlington War Memorial Stadium field that the 1925 building faced.
The school’s record over the past hundred years is unusual for any public high school in the region. National rankings in the 1960s placed W-L second in the country. In 1985, the U.S. Department of Education named the school a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. President Barack Obama addressed students there in 2012.
The 1966 boys varsity basketball team won the state championship as one of the school’s early integrated varsity squads, during Arlington Public Schools’ long desegregation process.
The W-L Cadet Corps was the first JROTC program in Northern Virginia. The crew team, formed in 1949, is the second-oldest scholastic rowing program in the region.
In 2025, Washington-Liberty marked its centennial.
The school’s official history page opens with a quote from O. U. Johansen, principal from 1961 to 1976: “This school in which you will receive your education has a nationwide reputation for excellence resulting from the past achievements of its students. You have a right to be proud of this reputation, but with this pride goes a responsibility for measuring up to the high standards of citizenship and scholarship.”
The Library of Congress photograph above, mystery date and all, is part of that hundred-year record.
The cars are 1920s vintage, not late-brass era vehicles from 1916.
I thought W-L was built in 1925?