Local family set to celebrate fifth-generation Thompson grad.
By June Mathews
On May 25, 1925, a young man named Ulysses Samson Eddings graduated from Thompson High School (THS). The school, only four years old at the time, was built to accommodate students in and around Siluria, a cotton mill town with a company village, later annexed by Alabaster. The graduating Class of 1925 numbered only nine.
On May 20, 2025, five days short of the 100th anniversary of Ulysses’ graduation, his great-great-grandson, Jacob Reynolds will walk across the stage of UAB’s Bartow Arena to claim his own THS diploma. The graduating Class of 2025, however, is “somewhat” larger than the Class of 1925—around 550 students larger.
Over the past century, many aspects of Thompson High School have undergone significant change. Not only has the student body grown, but THS has long since relocated from its original campus. Today’s technology has created a whole new atmosphere of learning for THS students, and transportation has evolved from a mule-drawn covered wagon to modern school buses and a parking lot filled with student-driven automobiles.
In the meantime, many members of the Eddings family have continued to attend and graduate from Thompson High School.
But Great-Great Grandfather Ulysses wasn’t Reynold’s first family connection to Thompson High School. According to his grandfather, Ken Eddings, the family’s ties to THS actually began with Mal (M.G.). Roy, a local merchant and landowner who also served as secretary of the local school board. Mal was Ulysses’ father-in-law and Jacob’s great-great-great-grandfather.
Family lore has it that a piece of the land Mal Roy owned ultimately became part of the first THS campus. “One day when I was 10 or 12 years old, Grandmother Roy took me to the history museum in Columbiana and showed me a paragraph in a book that said he either donated or sold some of his land to the school,” says Eddings. “Or it could have been the school just used part of his land. I’m not sure about the whole story, but growing up, I was always told he donated some land to the school.”
Regardless of the nature of Mal’s contribution of land, his other contributions as one of the early supporters of education continue to serve not only the Alabaster community but his own family as well. For five generations, many a THS graduate has been a member of the Roy-Eddings clan. So many that Ken would be hard pressed to name them all, but he can easily rattle off a list of close kinfolks who attended the school.
“My granddaddy went there, and my Grandmother Roy and her sisters and brother went there,” he says. “My dad and his brothers, and my brothers and I all went there. All those on the Roy side and the Eddings side went there. So did my daughter and now her son, Jacob. For over 100 years, somebody from our family has gone to Thompson High School.”
And the family couldn’t be better represented by their 2025 grad. An outstanding scholar who not only excels in the classroom but also in extracurricular activities, Reynolds is a well-rounded student. Though math is one of his favorite subjects, history runs a close second. A member of the National Honor Society, the Spanish Honor Society, Beta Club, and Leo Club, among other organizations, Jacob maintains a 3.95 grade-point average, kicked up to around 4.5 with his AP and dual enrollment classes. He also leads the percussion section in Thompson’s band, the Marching Southern Sounds.
Headed for the University of Alabama this fall, Jacob plans to study engineering. After considering his options and what he hopes to one day accomplish, he settled on electrical engineering. “For a while I bounced between mechanical and electrical because I want to go into energy engineering, but that’s not really a major field of study,” he says. “So now I’m pretty much set on electrical engineering. I’d also like to study some history.”
Thanks to his grandfather’s knowledge of their ancestry as it relates to local history, Reynolds has long been aware of his family’s multi-generational ties to THS. But as he nears the end of his high school days, he sees how his heritage sets his own story apart from the stories of the other students in his class. “They don’t have the 100-year connection and a family that has been part of our school from its beginning,” Reynolds says. “Nobody has that but me.”
The First of the Firsts: THS’s First 20 Years:
• First Day of School: October 3, 1921
• First Graduation Ceremony: May 21, 1922 (six grads)
• First School Bus: “The Transfer,” a covered wagon drawn by two mules, 1921 to 1934
• First Principal: Mr. Jesse Richardson
• First PTA (Parent-Teacher Association): Organized in 1932.
• First Football Team: Fielded during the 1932-1933 school year. The first coach was Mr. John T. Greene. The first team captain was Joe Hodges; the first co-captain was Don Busby, who scored the team’s first touchdown. The first game was played in a hay field. The first win came in its third game, a 19-0 victory over Ridge Grove. The first homecoming queens (then called “football sponsors”) were Willie Lavera Brasher and Julia Margaret Allan, escorted by the captain and co-captain of the football team, respectively.
• First Yearbook: The Warrior, published in 1937, edited by the senior class.
• First Band: Organized during the fall of 1937.
• First School Newspaper: Campus Highlights, published im the 1940-41 school year.
Source: Thompson High School History, researched by Bobby Joe Seales, Class of 1963