Pilgrim High School's building was finished being built in 1962 and opened on Monday, January 29, 1963. Pilgrim was founded because of the overcrowding at Warwick Veterans Memorial High School, now a middle school; "Vets," as Warwick Veterans Memorial High/Middle School is often referred to by Rhode Island residents, had been schooling about 3,900 students and running double sessions. This means that about half of Vets's students had been attending Vets at a different time of day than the other half of the students. Pilgrim High School was named after Pilgrim Park, the local area within which the high school is located. Specifically, Pilgrim High School is located at 111 Pilgrim Parkway in Warwick, Rhode Island 02888. 

At the time, the Warwick School Building Committee consisted of chairman Francis P. Nolan III, Helena R. Miner, Joseph S. Sinclair, Maurice J. Timlin, Peter J. Barrett, H. Robert Cole, James E. Cousineau, and Maurice F. Tougas. Warwick's mayor was Horace E. Hobbs; its superintendent of schools was Clarence S. Taylor; and its deputy superintendent of schools was Harold F. Scott. The architects and engineers who finished Pilgrim High School's 1962 building worked for Castellucci, Galli & Planka Associates, and the general contractor of Pilgrim's 1962 building was the Green Manor Construction Company. Pilgrim's first principal was Mr. Michael A. Morry, who served as Pilgrim's principal from its opening in 1963 until his retirement in 1984.

So, it was on a sub-22 degrees-Fareinheit Monday in January 1963 that all the Vets students who'd lived within Pilgrim's boundaries first set foot in the brand new school---Pilgrim---whose name came from that of its local area. At Vets, these students had been in the same classes as one another, and the secretary of Vets had even separated their attendance rolls from the students who weren't going to attend Pilgrim. Such preparation made for a smooth transition from Vets to Pilgrim, since it was like the Vets students who would attend Pilgrim had already been students at a different school from those who would stay at Vets anyway.

Stated best by Jennifer Coates in her Warwick Beacon article "Pilgrim to Step Back through Decades at Golden Anniversary," which describes Pilgrim's first moments in light of its 50th anniversary celebration in 2013, Pilgrim's first students entered "a model of shiny classrooms filled with new desks, of hallways void of skid marks or cast-off wads of paper, of a 'dining hall' waiting to serve up its first hot meals, of a gymnasium ready to host its first division basketball game, and of an auditorium bedecked with 'cypress green and rust curtains,' 'a wavy plaster ceiling that serves as an acoustical barrier[,]' and 150 seats with folding tops for note taking. There were even landscaped courtyards spread throughout; one designated just for seniors" (Coates).

Today, that senior-designated courtyard is the lunchyard, still designated just for seniors. However, is it actually used only by seniors and not by juniors and lower-classmen? Almost any one of today's Pilgrim Patriots would answer this question with the following social media communicative abbreviation: "iykyk." Perhaps the first Pilgrim students would have answered it with the '60s equivalent. Essentially, there are parallels to be drawn between then and now---between the transition from Vets to Pilgrim in the early 1960s and the transition from the current to the new building of Pilgrim in the mid to late 2020s, even though the latter transition doesn't involve the students attending a new school entirely. The Patriots of today and the newfound ones of the early '60s share similar circumstances, illustrating history's tendency to repeat itself.