For almost 13 years in the 1960s and early 1970s, William Franklin Dykes High School was the public high school for Historic Brookhaven teenagers. The school, which opened in 1960 at the corner of Powers Ferry and Jett Roads, included eighth through 12th grades.

 

The high school closed in 1973 when students started leaving the Atlanta public school system. In 1974, the building became Sutton Middle School and is now the Sutton sixth-grade campus. In 2015, Sutton’s seventh and eighth grades moved to the old North Atlanta High School campus at 2875 Northside Drive, which at the time Dykes was open housed Northside High School. Northside and North Fulton High Schools were overcrowded and Dykes was opened as more of a college-preparatory school. Reportedly over 90% of its graduates attended college. (The North Fulton campus now houses the private Atlanta International School. Northside and North Fulton continued to function as separate high schools after Dykes closed but in 1991 were merged to create North Atlanta High School.)

 

Dykes high school was located right across from Chastain Park, which first opened in 1945 as North Fulton Park. (The park was renamed Chastain a year later to honor the recently deceased county commissioner who had directed the park’s development.) In 1960, the area was still considered up and coming. Dykes used Chastain’s various facilities for some of its sports, such as cross country and golf.

 

The class of 1962 was the first to graduate from Dykes. Among its graduates was Johnny Isakson, former U.S. Senator from Georgia who then lived on East Brookhaven Drive. Billy Payne, a current East Brookhaven Drive resident and president and CEO of the 1996 Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, also graduated from Dykes.

 

Vermont Road resident Cathy Boston is a Dykes alum, as is West Brookhaven Drive resident Mary Stark. Mary graduated in 1968 and noted her class’s saying was: “We’re tough. We’re great. We’re the class of ’68.”

 

Alumni have referred to Dykes as Camelot, partly because it opened the same year John F. Kennedy, Jr., was elected president and because, as they describe it, the school was congenial and nearly ideal. In fact, the Facebook page for Dykes High School Graduates notes “it was not a perfect place, but for a short while Dykes High School was Camelot.”