Glasgow Middle School

Here follows a history of the school as published on the Fairfax County Public Schools website:

In 1958, the Fairfax County School Board voted to reorganize the public school system and establish the county’s first intermediate schools. Traditionally, students in grades 1-7 attended elementary schools, and students in grades 8-12 attended high schools. Intermediate schools were created to ease the transition from elementary school to high school, and provide students with a specialized program of study. In the summer of 1958, the School Board decided to use the newly constructed Parklawn Elementary School building as the pilot site for the first intermediate school. When schools opened in the fall of 1958, the student body at Parklawn was comprised of only 7th and 8th graders. The curriculum included English, history, geography, health, physical education, mathematics, science, foreign languages, music, art, home economics, band, and industrial arts. The pilot program proved so successful that Fairfax County Public Schools administrators embarked on an ambitious plan to open eight more intermediate schools during the 1960-61 school year. Glasgow Intermediate School was organized before all the others, during the 1959-60 school year, and operated out of the pilot Parklawn School site. Our first principal was Herman B. Lloyd. In the fall of 1960, when the other intermediate schools opened, Glasgow Intermediate School's building was still under construction. Classes were held at Parklawn and Falls Church High School until the spring of 1961 when the building was ready for occupancy. Early in the intermediate school planning process, it was decided that each school would be named for a famous author or poet. Our school was officially named Ellen Glasgow Intermediate School by the School Board in May 1959. In the 1990s, all intermediate schools in Fairfax County were renamed as middle schools.

Our Namesake
How did the Women’s Suffrage Movement influence the works of Ellen Glasgow?

During the 1960's, many of the middle schools built in Fairfax County were named for famous American writers and poets. Glasgow Middle School near Bailey's Crossroads is named after the Virginian author Ellen Glasgow. Ellen was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1873. She published her first novel, "The Descendent" in 1897 when she was 24 years old. Over the next 40 years she wrote some 20 novels, a collection of poetry, many short stories, and a book of literary criticism. During the women's suffrage movement in the early 1900's, Glasgow spoke at the first suffrage meeting in Virginia. Her later novels feature strong women characters that display many of the attributes of the women involved in the suffrage movement. Even though she's not as well known today as her contemporaries William Faulkner and Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow's novels were featured on the bestseller lists five times. Her last novel, "In This Our Life," received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1942 and was made into a movie in 1945. Ellen died of heart disease at her home in Richmond, Virginia. She is buried in that city at Hollywood Cemetery.