The school is located on a 1.8 acre site which extends west from University Avenue to the first alley on 64th Street and south for about one-third of the block.
The site was donated to be used as a school by Mr. James Wadsworth.

     The first school was a frame structure built in 1863. The first teacher was a sister-in-law of Mr. Wadsworth. Twenty-three pupils made up the membership, which was housed in a two room building. By 1889, another building, an eight-room frame structure, had been added to the site so there were two buildings, one the older two-room and a later eight-room structure.

     Names of streets were different in those early days. The Woodlawn School in 1863 was located on Lincoln, south of Everett Street. The two-room structure had a valuation of $6,000. The early Faculty of this two-room school were Fannie B. Rexford and Hadassol M.Fleming. The Woodlawn area which at first had been an unincorporated area became a part of Hyde Park about 1861 and this in turn was incorporated into Chicago in 1889. The school was still called the Woodlawn School, as previously mentioned, or sometimes, Woodlawn Park.

     In 1894, a new brick building of ten rooms replaced the frame structures. There was a combined gymnasium and assembly hall on the third floor. Isabel J. Burke was the principal at that time, serving from 1886 to 1919. She had roomed at the Wadsworth residence, located at the southwest corner of what is now known as 63rd Street and Woodlawn Avenue. Later, wings were added at each end of the brick building.

     The name "James Wadsworth" replaced the name of "Woodlawn School" when a new school was built and dedicated in 1920 to replace the older school which burned in 1918.

     The James Wadsworth School had 29 classrooms, an assembly hall seating 908 people and containing a floor space of 7,528 square feet, and a gymnasium with 2,806 square feet. Mr. Frank Mayo was principal at that time, serving from 1919 to 1933.

     In 1955, an eighteen-room addition was built and equipped at a cost of about $750,000. There was a Faculty of seventy at present. Mr. Claran E. Fullmer was principal as of the present date and has been since 1951. Miss Alice Wadsworth, the sole surviving daughter of James Wadsworth, was present and spoke at the dedication of the new addition. She had lived to witness the growth of an institution named in honor of her father from a one-room with twenty-three pupils and one teacher, in a building costing less than $5,000 to a school of approximately fifty times more rooms, over one hundred times more pupils, seventy times greater sized Faculty, and whose replacement cost would be approximately $3,000,000. Times certainly had changed.