A survey completed in the Fall of 1943 recommended the formation of a regional district as “both practical and feasible.” A committee was formed in 1944 to establish the comparative costs of building and operating a regional high school and to make recommendations. In April of 1945, a favorable report to build a high school was submitted by the committee, and in October 1947, the electors approved the formation of North Hunterdon Regional High School District. In 1948, the Board of Education purchased the tract of approximately fifty acres in Annandale on Route 69, and in 1950 the citizens approved a $700,000.00 bond issue.
Ground for the building was broken on April 16, 1950. The original school contained ten regular classrooms, seven special rooms for science, home economics, manual training, business education, art and music, a library, an agriculture annex housing a shop and classroom, a cafeteria, a combination auditorium and gymnasium, administrative offices and a health room. The building had a student body capacity of 600 students. A staff of twenty-five teachers, a librarian, a guidance director, school nurse and supervising principal administered the school program.
When the school opened on September 10, 1951, five hundred students arrived. The school was dedicated by Harry W. Moore, the Hunterdon County Superintendent of Schools. In 1955, a proposal to construct an addition to North Hunterdon High School was passed during a special election because of the projected enrollment of 973 students by 1960. Added to the original structure were fifteen classrooms, three student conference rooms, one band room, one choral music room, four shops, one agriculture laboratory, three homemaking rooms, a larger library, one boys’ gym, one girls’ gym, one auditorium, a larger cafeteria, a larger health unit and a larger office and guidance unit.
NHHS circa 1962
In 1967, facilities designed to house 1,120 students were housing over 1,371 students. A proposal was offered and accepted by the public to expand the existing high school to include eighteen new classrooms, nine science rooms, one art room, one reading and speech room, one industrial arts room, one music room, six vocational rooms, a new library, locker rooms, another cafeteria and a faculty dining room.
The proposal also included purchase of forty acres for $71,000.00 for future school construction in the Township of Lebanon. In the early seventies, High Bridge closed its small high school and became a sending district to North Hunterdon High School. In 1975, Voorhees High School was opened, and freshmen, sophomores and juniors from the four new sending districts to Voorhees left North Hunterdon High School. Prior to the opening, the 1974-75 school year was spent in split sessions. In 1978, Hampton and Glen Gardner became sending districts to Voorhees High School.
The last addition to North Hunterdon High School occurred after the passage of a bond referendum in 2001, which added a new gymnasium and new wing of science and math classrooms to the building.
