Austintown's old Fitch building remembered as it comes down

AUSTINTOWN — Jack Kidd remembers the first time he saw the old Austintown Fitch School on Mahoning Avenue. It was the winter of 1954, and his family was preparing to move to Austintown in the spring. They drove through town on a Sunday, and Kidd’s dad showed the kids where they would be attending school.

“I couldn’t wait to move and go to that school,” said Kidd, who would graduate in 1962. “From the day I saw that school, I always wanted to be a Falcon.”

The children of Austintown filed in and out of the building for more than 90 years.

When the building opened as Austintown Centralized School in 1916, eight horse-drawn carriages transported students who couldn’t walk to the school. Later it was a fleet of Ford Model Ts.

It was rechristened Austintown Fitch School in 1924. The district added several additions, and when the current Austintown Fitch High School opened in 1968, the building became Austintown Middle School.

It finally closed in 2007 after at least five years of complaints about plaster falling from the ceilings.

This week, more than 100 years after the building opened, backhoes and bulldozers razed parts of the school and loaded the debris into tractor trailers.

Read more of its history in Saturday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.