Qualla: Seebert Lane Colored School

Seebert Lane Colored School: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1921, the great social-documentary photographer Lewis Wickes Hine traveled through the West Virginia mountains for the National Child Labor Committee. He was looking for child laborers, but he was also looking for the schools they did or did not attend. In the tiny community of Seebert, in Pocahontas County, he found a one-room frame building about 24 by 40 feet, with a cupola on the roof and a small porch with two rounded columns. Inside, in a single room, all of the Black children of the surrounding hollows received whatever education the state of West Virginia was willing to provide. Hine photographed them. The photographs survive. The building survives. The community they represent is a piece of Appalachian history that the standard story tends to leave out.

Seebert Lane Colored School: Black Appalachia

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Seebert Lane Colored School: The Building

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Seebert Lane Colored School: Lewis Hine's Visit

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 sh...

Seebert Lane Colored School: After Brown

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Seebert Lane Colored School: Preservation

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 segrega...