This original - much smaller - Richland High School graduated it's last class of 11 students in 1942 -- the year Arthur H. Compton and Enrico Fermi produced the first nuclear chain reaction, thereby laying the foundation for changes that would transform the Tri-Cities.

The high school was built in 1911 near the present-day location of Lewis and Clark Elementary School.

By 1943, when Richland and its schools were taken over by the federal government, no classes were held after April and the graduating seniors had no commencement ceremony.

In 1944, classes resumed at the new high school, then called Columbia High School. The school mascot was the Beavers, but wartime patriotic fever helped spur a change to the Bombers, originally a reference to a bomb-dropping airplane. It wasn't until the 1970s that the school adopted its controversial mushroom cloud symbol.

By the late 1980s, the school's name was officially changed to Richland High School, so it wouldn't be confused with Columbia High School in Burbank.