Walter Johnson High School

Description

Walter Johnson High School is located at 6400 Rock Spring Drive in Bethesda, Maryland. WJHS serves portions of Bethesda, North Bethesda, and Rockville, as well as the towns of Garrett Park and Kensington.HistoryWalter Johnson High School was founded in 1956 as part of the Montgomery County Public School system (MCPS). The school is named in honor of the late Washington Senators' baseball pitcher, Walter Johnson, who resided in a Bethesda house which still stands just a few miles away from the school on Old Georgetown Road. After retiring from baseball, Walter Johnson became a county commissioner for Montgomery County.During the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the outer suburbs of Washington were within five minutes' drive of the Beltway, Walter Johnson was viewed as a "country" or "outer-suburban" school. The school was surrounded by farms and livestock, notably cow herds. Yearbooks indicate that, although at first Walter Johnson's rival high school may have been Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland, as early as 1960 a heated rivalry arose between Walter Johnson and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, which lasted several decades.