The school building, built circa 1890, is significant as a scarce and relatively intact example of late nineteenth-century vernacular architecture associated with the African American community and with the development of African American education in South Carolina. The school was established during Reconstruction.
The school provided an education for hundreds of African American youth at a time when public education for African Americans was deficient. In 1932, in the midst of the Depression, the Board of National Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. decided to discontinue its financial support of the day schools it had long supported in the South.
The school did not close, however, but continued to educate local children until it was consolidated in 1960 with Eastern School, a black public school.
