Cunderdin District High School is celebrating 75th anniversary this weekend.

Cunderdin District High School is celebrating its 75th anniversary and the Cunderdin Museum will mark its 50th year with a jam-packed weekend.

Cunderdin DHS principal Jonathon Arnott said the school, museum board and Shire had been working hard over the past few months to get as many people as possible back to town for the one-off weekend.

"Our school was built in 1948 as part of a Labor government promise to build schools that would last for 50 years,'' Mr Arnott said.

"Here we are 75 years later, in the same building.''

As part of the celebrations, this Saturday, March 11, the school will host a community lunch and then run classroom tours and youth activities during the afternoon.

At a midday ceremony to mark the 75th milestone, Mr Arnott will try to recreate the moment when six-year-old, year one student Helen Baxter cut the official opening ribbon in 1948.

Now a well-known local figure, Helen Darmody lives across the road from the school and has only just retired as the town's bus driver.

Former principal, 95-year-old Fred Marsh is also heading to town from Perth to share his reflections as a special guest speaker.

Mr Arnott said Mr Marsh had already told him that his time as principal of the then junior agricultural college, from 1967-1970, were the "three busiest years'' of his life.

Also during the weekend, the Cunderdin Museum will host an open photography competition this Friday, March 10.

The museum, housed in the historic no3 pumping station for the Goldfields pipeline, will officially unveil its 'Sense of Place' photographic exhibition at a private function on Saturday.

The exhibition, showcasing the Shire's landscapes and its citizens' life, work and recreation, will then be open to the public until April 16.

In addition, the town hall will host a memories exhibition.

The community is expected to be out in force for a family-friendly gala dinner celebration on Saturday night at the sports centre and - to recover - a community breakfast will be held at 7-9am on Sunday, March 12.

Cunderdin European history goes back to 1864, when it was named by explorer Charles Hunt, but it was the building of the railway in 1884 and the water pipeline to Kalgoorlie, which caused it to grow and prosper as a pastoral region and saw the township declared in 1906.

Its first high school - for students in kindergarten to year 10 - was built on the site of the town's original single-room school and incorporated all the other single-room schools set up in hamlets across the district.

These outlying schools are now memorialised in the names of its bus runs.

The early high school grew to incorporate a farm in 1958 and until 1984 was run across two sites as the Cunderdin Junior Agricultural College.

But by 1984, it was recognised that the college had become too big for one principal to manage, Mr Arnott said.

With the expanded farm campus separated to become the WA College of Agriculture, Cunderdin, the town campus stepped up to become a district high school.

"It would have been a 24/7 job trying to manage 150 kids in town at that time, plus 30 kids out at the ag college, plus you were managing staff and you were a farm manager as well,'' Mr Arnott said of the junior ag college.

"It became such a big job, they decided it was not right for one person to do it all."

From an original eight classrooms, Cunderdin DHS now encompasses a large computing lab, mini computing lab, science lab, music room, large pre-primary/kindergarten, art room, well-equipped library, design and technology wing with a computer lab and a food and textiles wing.

And as the infrastructure has changed over the years, so has enrolments.

From an initial 20 students starting in February, 1948, it has 175 students attending this year - including from town, surrounding farming families and secondary students from Tammin and Meckering.

Mr Arnott said there were about 13-20 pupils in each year group, who are accommodated in blended classes.

"The school has had ebbs and flows in the numbers of students it has had over the years,'' he said.

"I believe in the 1970s, there were three full classrooms of year 9s and the school had well over a couple of hundred students.

"Of late, we have been able to maintain about 150 students each year.''

The school still operates in its beautiful, well-maintained, late-1940s building, which Mr Arnott said remained fit for many decades of useful service.

He credited its strength and longevity to its sense of community.

"This is a beautiful community and everyone here is looking after each other,'' said Mr Arnott, who is in his fourth year as its principal.

"Our kids are the ones who pull each other up and say 'that's not how we behave here'.

"Without a doubt every parent cares for every child in the school, besides their own.

"I think that is one of the greatest assets of this school.''