Evansville Central High School, also known as Central High, is a public high school on the north side of Evansville, Indiana. It is the oldest high school in continuous operation west of the Allegheny Mountains. It was established in 1854 as Evansville High School. The name was changed to Central High School in 1918 when FJ Reitz High School was built.Central moved to its current location on the far north side of Evansville in the early 1970s. It is sometimes called "Vanderburgh Central" because of its location near the geographic center of Vanderburgh County, in addition to its status as the county's oldest high school. For many years, it was the northernmost high school in the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation; it was four miles northwest of Evansville North High School. However, with the completion of the new North High School campus in northern Vanderburgh County, geographic correctness was restored to the name."During the first forty years of our school's existence, there were no athletics of a competitive sort. In 1896 we had a mathematics teacher on our faculty named Linnaeus N. Hines. A giant of a man, nearly seven feet tall and huge in every direction, he must have weighed 300 pounds. Mr. Hines had become fond of football and considered it a fine sport for boys able to stand the roughness of the game. He organized a team in 1896 which arranged games with other school teams. Since there was no State Athletic Association then to make rules covering eligibility, Mr. Hines played center. Only 13 boys came out for the team that year..." "Leanord Young, physics teacher and later principal, also played on the team." (Meyer, p. 149)
