Stockbridge leaders are hoping to save a piece of television history before it’s lost to demolition.
The Henry County city wants to preserve the sign on the front of Patrick Henry High School as a tourist attraction for fans of the hit Netflix streaming series “Stranger Things.” That would involve
Patrick Henry served as the home of fictional Hawkins middle and high schools, a key meeting place of the characters of the show, which is coming to an end with a final fifth season. Patrick Henry was closed in 2015 and has served as storage for Henry County Schools and as a filming location.
It is slated to be razed this year — with demolition to begin possibly in September — to make way for a $73 million Henry STEM high school to be opened in Stockbridge in 2027.
The city wants to preserve the bricks on which “Hawkins High School” was painted in the show’s later seasons, said Stockbridge City Councilman Elton Alexander, who is pushing for the sign’s salvaging. The bricks would be reassembled after being dismantled from the building and possible displayed in the city’s downtown community.
Credit: CITY OF STOCKBRIDGE
Credit: CITY OF STOCKBRIDGE
“Each time I go by there, there is always a car or two with people taking pictures because the word is out that the sign was there,” Alexander said.
If a sign is salvaged, it will join other Stockbridge tourism sites, such as Floyd Chapel Baptist Church — the site of the first sermon by Martin Luther King Sr., father of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — and Green Front Cafe, a venue that was the gathering place for the city’s Black community dating back to the late 1940s.
Other productions that have shot in Stockbridge include the revival of CBS’s “MacGyver” series, a “The Fast and the Furious” sequel and the cliffs in a fight scene in 2018′s “Black Panther,” said Uneeda Smith-Sellers, business services supervisor for Stockbridge.
“The part of ‘Black Panther’ where they are standing on the rocks watching him fight to be king was shot at the (Vulcan Materials) quarry,” she said, adding that the actual fight was done elsewhere and the quarry was later superimposed in the background.
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