Kelly View School, a small, one-room frame building, stands as an important vestige of the early educational and social history of the Southern Appalachian coalfields, rural Wise County, and the Kelly View area. The school is now the only surviving pre-World War I non-domestic structure in the community. Schoolhouses such as Kelly View fulfilled important roles in the education and civic life of rural communities in Virginia for generations of students who attended, and for their families whose social and community life was centered there. Accounts of student and community activities at Kelly View School present solid testimony for its educational and social significance. Around 1960 the building ceased to be used as a school, and eventually served as a church until the 1980s. In 1976, the Kelly View School was moved a short distance to make way for the new Appalachia Elementary School.