Seaside School (Seaside Colored School), Edisto Island, SC

OLD SCHOOL OF THE DAY

Seaside School (Seaside Colored School)

1097 SC 174

Edisto Island, South Carolina

Seaside School, also known as Seaside Colored School, is a historic school building for African-American children located just off S.C. Highway 174, near the center of Edisto Island, Charleston County, South Carolina, and is associated with the education of African-American Edistonians from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. At least one and perhaps two school buildings have been located on its site since 1865. In 1930, the Edisto Island school district had planned to merge Seaside with Central African American school, but the community, affected by the Great Depression, could not raise enough money for the lot and school supplies. This smaller structure was built instead.   It was erected about 1931 as its second building, and is a one-story, two-room, rectangular frame building. It sits on a low brick pier foundation, with a lateral gable roof of V-crimped metal, and has weatherboard exterior siding. Rafter ends are exposed at the main body and at the small shed porch protecting the paired entry doors. One original five-panel door remains. 

     An example of a schoolhouse used by rural black South Carolinians into the 1950s, Seaside School is said by many of the older residents of Edisto Island, black and white, to be the oldest black school on the island, From 1931 until the construction of a consolidated school in 1954, black residents of Edisto Island received their primary education in this building.  The school has been vacant since 1954, except for brief periods of residential tenant occupancy. It is one of only three remaining historic schools of at least eight (Seaside White, Seaside Colored, Borough White, Borough Colored, Central Colored, Whaley Industrial, Edisto Island Consolidated, and Larimer Presbyterian) that have been documented on Edisto Island in the twentieth century, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. Exterior alterations have been minor.