Popular imagination tends to picture Appalachia as uniformly white, but Black communities have existed in the West Virginia mountains since before the Civil War. Some were the descendants of enslaved people who worked the early Greenbrier Valley plantations. Others arrived later as workers in the coal and timber industries. Seebert, on the Greenbrier River near Hillsboro, was one of those small mixed communities that the Jim Crow legal system divided neatly into separate schools, separate cemeteries, and separate churches. The Seebert Lane Colored School - the name reflects the official 1898 vocabulary - was built around 1898 to serve the Black children of the surrounding farms.

It is a modest building. One story, frame construction, front gable, with a symmetrical facade and a small entry porch held up by two simple round columns. There is a cupola on the roof, which served as both a bell housing and a small architectural acknowledgment that this was a public building rather than a barn or a shed. The interior measures roughly 24 feet, 4 inches by 40 feet, 4 inches - the size of a generous living room. All grades of all children studied there at once, taught by a single teacher who was almost always Black, almost always underpaid, and almost always carrying the additional weight of representing every adult ambition for an entire generation. A fuel shed stood in the yard for the wood that heated the building in winter.

Hine had spent more than a decade documenting child labor in American mines, mills, and farms - his photographs would help shift public opinion enough to pass federal child labor laws. By 1921 he was extending the same documentary methods to education, photographing schools to show what children were and were not getting. The Seebert Lane photographs he took that year are among the relatively few surviving images of segregated Black rural schools in West Virginia. They show children seated in rows, the teacher standing at a desk, the cupola visible through a window. The faces are serious in the way that all subjects look serious in early-20th-century portrait photography, but the children are present, looking at the camera, claiming their place in a national archive that has remembered very few children like them.

There is no reliable date for when the Seebert Lane school closed. The most likely answer is sometime after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, when West Virginia, like other states with segregated systems, began the long uneven process of integrating its schools. The building's bell stopped ringing for the children of Seebert and Hillsboro. The Black families who had sent their children there now sent them to the formerly all-white public schools in the area. The Seebert Lane building, no longer needed for its original purpose, did what such buildings often do: it sat. It survived because no one tore it down, not because anyone made a particular decision to preserve it.

In 2012, the Seebert Lane Colored School was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The nomination form, prepared by Jean Boger and Susan Critchley, makes the case that the building is historically significant precisely because so few of its kind survive. Most segregated rural schools were small, undocumented, and easily demolished once they were no longer needed. The Seebert Lane school is one of a small number of surviving examples in West Virginia, and the only one in Pocahontas County. The names of the students Hine photographed are not all known. Their descendants are still in the area. The building stands as a small architectural testimony to a community that the official historical record once tried to make invisible.