Melrose High graduates reflect on their years at the school as building reopens as Orange Mound Library
843 Dallas Street was once a flourishing high school, then an abandoned building. Now, it's a thriving part of Orange Mound.
The abandoned old Melrose High School in Orange Mound is now open and operating as a library for the first time in decades.
It will soon have a Genealogy Center and senior apartments. This is the first library Orange Mound will be just walking distance from so many homes.
Neighbors fought for decades to re-open the old high school and now the wait is over.
Jackie Holland, Esther Cook-Jones, Hazell Glover-Jones and Latrina Macon-Norman are just a few of the orange mound veterans bringing this project to life.
“It was a long fight for us to receive this,” Jackie Holland said. “We worked on this for almost 15-18 years.”
Today, the building is a force in the community. It shows what can come from dedication and love for a neighborhood.
Neighbors will soon be able to meet with Orange Mound-natives and historians to trace generations of their ancestry.
How we got here
It’s been 40 years since the building held its last graduating class. Unknown to students, the school would close in 1979.
It was also almost the last time this building would be open to the public.
“Everybody was not on board when we decided that we wanted a library down here,” Holland said. “Some people wanted to demolish this building.”
After years of meetings, construction site and hard hat tours, the Orange Mound library is a reality.
“When I say 'so proud,'” Esther Cook-Jones said. “They feel so proud because this year, the same year that this is going up we’re having our 40th reunion so you know this gone be talked about when we have that reunion.”
Cook-Jones graduated from Melrose in 1984. Now, the building she spent years in growing up, sits on a renamed street after Judge Earnestine Hunt Dorse. Dorse is a judge in the Bluff City who also graduated from Melrose High School.
Pillar of Hope
Neighbors are hopeful the new library will be a step in the right direction. The goal is bringing activities just footsteps away from young people’s front doors, especially as the neighborhood navigates an increase in crime over the last few years.
“It’s something for these children to be proud of,” Cook-Jones said. “They can walk around and see how our community is. This is gunna help them educational wise, spiritual wise everything else. They just didn’t have nowhere to go. It’s a blessing.”
“We’re here to assist them in every way and any way that we can,” Latrina Macon-Norman.
Macon-Norman graduated high school in 1981.
“I am truly blessed; I am truly humbled, and I am honored to be a part of this great historical moment. I love my orange mound community,” Macon-Norman said.
“Baby, hold your head up," Cook-Jones said. "You from Orange Mound and I ain’t ever gone forget that."
This is a historic step forward for Orange Mound. Neighbors say there is still work to be done, but next up is the 40th reunion of Melrose High’s graduating class of 1984.
If you have old Orange Mound photos, you can bring them to the Orange Mound library to be scanned into the archives.