September 26, 2016: Upper Iowa University football field in Fayette. Go Peacocks!
Fayette has a distinction: It is a “college town” — Upper Iowa University is the only Division II site in Iowa — that hasn’t had its own high school since 1984. Fayette High teams even started out as the “Little Peacocks” (cf. Little Panthers, Little Cyclones and Little Hawks). I thought about this with the news that the North Fayette and Valley districts were having a consolidation vote today. It is safe to say that this is one of a very few situations, but I didn’t know if it was the only.
After further investigation, the answer is yes-and-no. Peru (PEE-ru), home of Peru State College in the way way southeast corner of Nebraska, has a population under 1000 and no high school — or any K-12 school at all. But Peru State doesn’t have graduate programs, so the distinction may still be made that Fayette is the only town in the United States that has a university but not a high school.
Peru is the site of the first institution of higher education in Nebraska (1867); there was one founded in Lincoln two years later, but its story is clouded in obscurity and irrelevance.