On May 10, 1973, Trussville children were sent running out of a 51-year-old building by orange flames and black smoke. Hewitt Elementary School, the one located on North Chalkville Road near the former Trussville City Schools Central Office, caught fire around 11:30 a.m. that Thursday. The fire apparently started in the center of the building and spread throughout the wood-and-brick building within seconds.

The cause of the fire remains a talking point today. Oiled wooden floors? Kids with matches? Something wrong with the lights?

Miraculously, not one of the nearly 600 fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders was injured. Perhaps the biggest losses that day were 937,000 bottle caps that students had collected (the goal was one million), library books and many of those yearbooks. The ordeal was such a big moment that the Trussville History Museum at Heritage Hall features articles, photos and even a printed collection of student comments about the fire.

That building had served as Trussville School from 1922 to 1926, R.G. Hewitt High School from 1925 to 1938 and then Hewitt Elementary School from 1938 to 1973. It included a concrete lintel over the school’s double doors, which came down in the fire but was salvaged years later and is now preserved, more than 100 years since its creation.

For the remainder of that school year, classes took place in the Trussville Methodist Church and the nearby former First National Bank building. Portable classrooms were used for the 1973 fall term until additions could be made to the annex school on Cherokee Drive, which became the only elementary school in the city at the time.