Allegany High School was initially a secondary education school held on Maryland Avenue. The school had many different locations, including the building on Greene Street, which was used as a combined middle/high school until the spring of 1926. At that time, the building now known as Allegany High School had been completed and was prepared to accept Greene Street’s high school students. Middle school students remained on Greene Street until the school later burned down in 1932. “Camp Hill,” the site of the present day Allegany, was a federal army camp during the Civil War.

The “Camper” mascot is a source of much confusion. Many think the name refers to Campobello, a Shawnee Indian Tribe camp, from which the federal army took their name during the Civil War. This, however, is a misconception. The most widely accepted theory is that Civil War General Lewis Wallace and his men began calling the site during their time here. The word Campobello in fact, does not appear in any Native American language and is derived from Latin, meaning “camp of war”.

Beginning in 2009, ACPS hired an independent educational research consultant, Eperitus, to perform a study on possible solutions for utilizing the county’s secondary schools. The study concluded that Allegany was number one in the county to receive capital improvements. ACPS would then grant a contract to Grimm & Parker Architects of Calverton, Maryland, to conduct a study on three Cumberland land area schools. The main goal of this study was to explore options for these three schools while maintaining a safe, healthy, and educationally enriching environment. As the study ended, they concluded that the most efficient and beneficial action would be to move Allegany to a new location. 

Finding a new home for Allegany proved to serve as a challenge as several sites were taken into consideration before the school board finally decided on the site of the former Western Maryland Health System’s Sacred Heart Hospital on top of Haystack Mountain. The school board decided that none of the aforementioned hospital’s buildings would be incorporated into the new school, opting to demolish the old buildings to make way for Allegany’s campus. With the location decided, all that was left for the school board was to choose a design and contractor to make the new school a reality. The school board once again chose Grimm & Parker Architects to take up the task of constructing the new school, the decision being unanimous following their excellent work on Mountain Ridge High School and the Frostburg and Lonaconing Libraries. Settling on a final decision for the design of the campus proved to be a more challenging task, however, as finding the means to fund the construction became the hardest task of all. As of September 2015 the available funding for the new school was $35.2 million, which was $11.8 million short of the lowest base bid of $47 million. Over the next year, the school board and Grimm & Parker worked together to increase the overall efficiency of the school while reducing costs. In order to help increase the funds accumulated by the county, they acquired another $10 million in borrowed money as well as appropriated another $4 million, leaving the total bill of the new school to be $49.2 million. 

The groundbreaking ceremony for Allegany was held on May 23, 2016 at 10 A.M. at the site of the newly constructed school on Haystack Mountain. The school opened in time for the 2018-2019 school year. 

Allegany High School currently  has an enrollment of approximately 700 students, focusing on student achievement and success in all areas of education through a combined effort of students, faculty, staff, home, and community. The class of 2022 marked an important milestone for Allegany: the students were the 135th class to graduate from the long-standing institution.