The other day, while sitting in the first period, I tried thinking of a good article to write. Naturally, my mind was blank, honestly, empty of everything I’d ever known. But, after listening to Mr. Manero’s morning announcements, and hearing it close every morning with the “stay uknighted” mantra, I started to think about how we even became the North Penn Knights. How we even became North Penn, to begin with.
To be totally honest, I had a lot of trouble finding information. I spent a good week digging through our old archives, which, by the way, can be found on our site. Trying to find any bit of information I could about our school.
I started by looking through The Huskie Barker around when we had conjoined High Schools. Bigger schools were becoming a trend for neighboring districts. For example, districts like Central Bucks, Pennridge, Quakertown (formally Quakertown-Tohickon), and Hatboro Horsham all “connote a jointure between two or more districts”, according to the March 1954 edition of the paper.
1955 marked the beginning of North Penn Joint High School when 3 schools in our district had conjoined: Lansdale High School, Hatfield High School, and North Wales High School (currently Penndale Middle School, Hatfield Elementary, and North Wales Elementary). But with the new joint school, it also came with new colors and mascots.
In May of 1955, The Huskie Barker announced the proposal for new colors. Winning the vote was obviously the two-tone blue: Columbia and Navy. Following closely behind was scarlet and grey, then red and gold.
However, neither of the three combinations won the technical majority vote of 828 votes, causing a follow-up ballot to be considered where only the top two color combinations were voted on. The last ballot proved majority for our two-tone blue; thus, North Penn repped Columbia and Navy.
Finding how we actually became The North Penn Knights was a lot harder though. Thanks to the help of The Lansdale Historical Society, they found a clip from The Reporter from a Tuesday on October 18th 1955.
The article reported that the vote for a new mascot was an overwhelming outcome for the Knights as they won by a landslide. Both the Penguins and the Pioneers competed against the Knights.
The current building that we call North Penn High School is on Valley Forge Road and was built in 1971 with the K-pod addition being added 1999 when the school decided to not build a second high school.
If that interests you, make sure to read former Knight Crier staff writer Harsh Desai’s 2023 article on the decisions of past renovations where he really delved into NP history, interviewing past principals and school board members during the time of these renovation ideas.
And that’s how the North Penn Knights came to be.
