Johnny Cain
Sixty years ago Lanier was known throughout the South as a bastion of academic excellence and athletic prowess. I grew up 120 miles to the West, went to high school in Tennessee, but I well knew of Lanier. My wife graduated from here, and she thought the school was a Mecca. It was built in 1929, Gothic Revival style, to combine rivals Sidney Lanier HS (now the Baldwin Magnet school) and Montgomery County HS (later Cloverdale Junior High, now Huntingdon’s Cloverdale Campus). A football game was held to decide which school got to keep its name; Lanier won. The structure cost $750k, and in 1930 it was referred to as “the Million Dollar School”; people marveled at the extravagance. Time marches on; don’t get trampled.
It was said that Cloverdale High School had the better team back in 1929, but Lanier had imported a former Montgomerian from Memphis, where he had already made a name for himself as a high school sophomore football player. His name was Johnny Cain, and after he won the “name-keeping” game for Lanier in ’29, he went on to Alabama, played on its 1930 National Champion Rose Bowl team, was All-American in ’31 and ’32, and was named to Alabama’s “Team of the Century” in 1992. No wonder Lanier won.
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- An artist’s drawing of Sidney Lanier HS when it was built on South McDonough Street in 1910, which makes the school 100 years old. This was Montgomery’s first public coed school, and it was named for Poet Sidney Lanier, a onetime organist at First Presbyterian, and sometime clerk at his grandfather’s Exchange Hotel.
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- The old Sidney Lanier, which exists today as Baldwin Magnet School. Note from Pic #1 that Scott Street was closed to afford the school playground space. Then, circa 1981, after the structure had served as Baldwin Junior High for many years the street was reopened (my project) following the closing of the school. When the building reopened as Baldwin Magnet some years later, its playground space was gone.
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- The former Montgomery County High School, built ca 1922, was converted to Cloverdale Junior High when the new Sidney Lanier was built in 1929. It is now part of Huntingdon College.
-Charles Humphries
Who is Baldwin school named after?