History
Burtonwood
American High School
Warrington, Lancashire, England In September 1950, near the industrial town of Warrington on
the River Mersey in the county of Lancashire in northern England, the Burtonwood
American High School held its first classes. Each year the curriculum became
more varied. Pupils played football baseball, basketball, and soccer; produced
plays and programs; formed clubs and traveled upon sponsored tours from
Burtonwood, not only to local points of interest but also to more distant parts
of the United Kingdom and to seven Continental countries to become acquainted
with the land about them. In 1887, the school grounds were meadow and farmlands, George
Stephenson’s Rocket had made its trial run over fifty years before upon
the railway only a few miles away. A few half-timbered, "black and
white" homes had been landmarks for centuries. Over six hundred years
before, in 1257, records showed an owner of Burton wood, a meadowland with
wooded streams and the home of red deer. The Saxon churches built about the time
of King Alfred the Great were crumbling with age but were being rebuilt by the
Normans. In 257 A. D., Warrington in Roman Britain was Veritanium.
Manchester was Mancunium and Chester was Deva, an old port on the
River Dee and headquarters of the Roman XX Legion Valeria Victrix for
four hundred years. Upon Chester’s walls where Burtonwood pupils walked, the
Roman legionaries kept watch. Along a road, which served as a highway for over
one thousand years, marched ranks of soldiers on their way through Warrington to
Lancaster, later associated with Lancelot of the King Arthur stories, but then a
northern outpost of the Roman Empire. The Manchester Ship Canal is now crowded with ocean-going
vessels as were the Dee and the Mersey with Roman galleys then. To Burtonwood students, the mingling of the past and the
present was one of the facets of
Excerpted from 1957 Vapor Trails yearbook