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Altamont School

private school in Birmingham, Alabama, United States

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ4736135 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Altamont School, located in Birmingham, Alabama atop Red Mountain, is a college preparatory day school with coeducational enrollment of grades 5–12. Most of the students live in Birmingham and the surrounding communities.

History

Altamont was established in 1975 as a merger between the Brooke Hill School, a college preparatory school for girls founded in 1940, and the Birmingham University School, a boys' school founded in 1922 by Basil M. Parks.

Cecil F. Stodghill, Jr. was named Head of School in 2022.

Campus

Altamont's main campus is located on 28 acres (11 ha) on the crest of Red Mountain just south of downtown Birmingham. The main school building houses forty classrooms, two science wings, a fine arts center, a student center, an art gallery and sculpture garden, a computer lab, a 20,000-volume library, and special studios for chorus, art, photography, and orchestra. An audio-visual recording studio was recently added to the fine arts suite. The athletic facilities include two gymnasiums with two basketball courts, three volleyball courts and a weight room. The main campus offers six tennis courts, a soccer field and a track.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Altamont School” is private school in Birmingham, Alabama, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Altamont, School and private, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1975, 1940, 1922, 2022—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1975. For this dossier, Altamont, School and private is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “private school in Birmingham, Alabama, United States” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4736135. Authority coordinates are 33.514, -86.758. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975, 1940, 1922 and 2022.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Altamont School”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Altamont School primary sources, Altamont School archive and Altamont research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Altamont School”?
  2. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Altamont School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.