Seventeen Years Too Long: Lincoln School’s 1926 Warning
Part four of a four-part series examining Lincoln School through the 1921 federal Educational Survey of Wheeling. Part four
On March 29, 1926, the Wheeling Intelligencer announced what Lincoln School’s students, teachers, and families already knew: the school needed a new building.
The newspaper described an overcrowded school serving approximately 270 children in a building with only nine classrooms. It reported that classes were being taught in spaces never intended for instruction and warned of a serious fire hazard. The article’s conclusion was unmistakable: the conditions at Lincoln were no longer adequate for the education and safety of Wheeling’s Black children.
The alarm had been sounded publicly.
The solution, however, would take more than seventeen years.
A modern Lincoln High School building was finally dedicated on December 5, 1943. Between that 1926 warning and the 1943 dedication, generations of young people continued walking through Lincoln’s doors. They studied, competed, performed, led student organizations, encouraged one another—and graduated.
Their story deserves to stand at the center of this history.
Eighteen Classes Passed Through the Old Lincoln
The surviving graduation totals help us understand what those seventeen years meant in human terms.
From 1926 through 1943—eighteen graduating classes during the seventeen-year interval between the newspaper warning and the new building’s dedication—Lincoln awarded diplomas to 226 students.
They included 97 young men and 129 young women.
The Class of 1926, graduating in the same year that the Intelligencer sounded its alarm, numbered only six students: two young men and four young women. In 1929, the graduating class numbered just five.
Yet the classes gradually grew:
Lincoln graduated 14 students in 1933.
Seventeen students completed high school in 1935.
Nineteen graduated in 1936.
The Class of 1938 included 21 graduates.
In 1943, the year of the new building’s dedication, Lincoln graduated 24 students—the largest class of this period.
The first seven classes following the 1926 warning, from 1926 through 1932, produced 47 graduates. From 1933 through 1943, another 179 students received Lincoln diplomas.
The figures do not tell us why one class was larger or smaller than another. Graduation totals cannot reveal how many students transferred, left school to work, moved away, became ill, or encountered other obstacles. They also cannot, by themselves, measure the effect of overcrowding.
But they tell us something powerful: education at Lincoln did not stop while Wheeling waited.
Every Number Was a Name
Historical statistics can become impersonal. A total such as 226 may look like a figure in a ledger, but every number represented a young person standing at the threshold of adulthood.
Every graduate had a name.
Every diploma represented assignments completed, examinations passed, lessons learned, and expectations carried forward. Behind each student stood teachers laboring within an inadequate building and families who understood that education offered their children possibilities that segregation attempted to restrict.
Among these graduates was Eileen Miller of the Class of 1938. Miller continued her education at West Virginia State College, graduating in 1942. Her journey from Lincoln to college illustrates what the school was accomplishing even before it received the building its students deserved. Lincoln was not simply moving children from one grade to another. It was preparing young Black men and women for higher education, professional service, leadership, and lives of purpose.
The complete alumni rolls make the history even more personal. They restore individuality to the statistics and allow descendants to recognize parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, teachers, and community leaders. Their names remind us that Lincoln’s history was made by people—not buildings alone.
Achievement Inside an Overcrowded School
The accomplishments of these graduates become more remarkable when placed beside the conditions reported in 1926.
Lincoln’s students were not failing to fill an adequate school. They were succeeding in a building that had failed to keep pace with them.
The earlier Lincoln building had been erected in 1893 and would serve for approximately fifty years. During Principal J. H. Rainbow’s leadership, enrollment reportedly grew from 168 pupils taught by seven teachers to approximately 450 pupils taught by twenty teachers. By 1943, Lincoln’s high-school department alone enrolled 202 students with ten teachers. Ohio County Public Library’s historical sketch documents this extraordinary institutional growth.
The students kept coming because the community valued education. The graduating classes grew because Lincoln’s teachers and families kept young people moving toward commencement despite the limitations around them.
A crowded classroom could restrict their space, but it could not contain their ambition.
An aging building could make their work harder, but it could not erase their ability.
A delayed public response could postpone justice, but it could not prevent 226 young people from claiming their diplomas.
The Long Road to 1943
When the new Lincoln High School opened in 1943, it represented a dramatic improvement. The approximately $300,000 facility contained fourteen classrooms, a library, science laboratories, industrial-arts rooms, a model apartment, and an assembly room seating about 200 people.
These were more than architectural features. They represented opportunities that Lincoln’s students and teachers had been pursuing for decades with inadequate space.
Yet even the new building did not immediately solve every problem. According to the historical sketch, 174 elementary pupils continued using the old adjoining building, while another 90 attended classes at Dunbar. Progress had arrived, but the struggle for fully equal educational facilities was not over.
The new school should therefore be remembered both as an achievement and as evidence of how long Wheeling’s Black community had been expected to wait.
What the Graduates Teach Us
The seventeen years between 1926 and 1943 contained enormous national hardship: the Great Depression, widespread unemployment, and the opening years of the Second World War. Lincoln’s students faced those events while also living within segregated systems that limited where Black Americans could study, work, live, and participate in public life.
Still, they graduated.
They became members of a growing alumni community whose influence extended well beyond the school. Some pursued college. Some became educators, skilled workers, musicians, businesspeople, caregivers, parents, church leaders, and community builders.
Many accomplishments may never have reached the newspaper, but they mattered deeply within families and neighborhoods.
Their diplomas were not merely pieces of paper. They were declarations that Black aspiration would continue despite institutional neglect.
Later students—including Beverly Pervall and her classmates in Lincoln’s Class of 1950—would inherit the school these earlier graduates helped sustain. They entered a newer building, but they also entered a tradition created by the students who had studied and graduated during the long years of waiting.
Preserving the Record, Honoring the People
The story of Lincoln School is not simply that Wheeling waited seventeen years to replace an overcrowded and hazardous building.
The deeper story is what Lincoln’s community accomplished during the wait.
While officials deliberated, teachers taught.
While the old building aged, families continued sending their children through its doors.
While space remained scarce, students continued learning.
And while Wheeling postponed a new school, 226 Lincoln graduates stepped forward to receive their diplomas.
Their names belong in the story because they were the story.
The Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation preserves records such as these so that Lincoln’s students are remembered not merely as occupants of an inadequate building, but as determined young people who transformed education into achievement.
The new Lincoln School eventually opened in 1943. But long before its doors opened, Lincoln’s students had already demonstrated what was possible.
The building was delayed.
Their future was not.
-T
Sources and research note
“New Building Is Needed at Lincoln School Here,” The Wheeling Intelligencer, March 29, 1926, p. 3.
“Historical Sketch of Lincoln School,” in Souvenir Program, Dedication of the New Lincoln High School, Wheeling, W. Va., December 5, 1943, transcribed by the Ohio County Public Library.
Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, Lincoln Grads by Gender, working spreadsheet compiled from Lincoln School graduation records, entries for 1926–1943.
“Biography: Eileen Miller,” Ohio County Public Library.
The graduation figures record completed diplomas, not total enrollment or attendance. They do not establish why class sizes changed or how many students left school, transferred, or completed their education elsewhere. The labels “Boys” and “Girls” appear in the source spreadsheet; the narrative uses “young men” and “young women.”
