W.E.B. Du Bois Walked These Roads

Most guests who pull up to the Little Lake House have their eyes on the water — and we get it. Puckett's Point is a five-minute walk, the lake opens up into miles of quiet coves, and that sunrise over the Highland Rim doesn't get old. But there's another reason this corner of DeKalb County is worth paying attention to, one that has nothing to do with boat ramps or waterfalls.

In the summers of 1886 and 1887, an eighteen-year-old named William Edward Burghardt Du Bois taught the children of formerly enslaved families at Wheeler School near Watertown in rural Wilson County. He was a scholarship student at Fisk University in Nashville, earning $28 a month, living with a local family, and seeing the Tennessee countryside for the first time. The experience cracked something open in him — and it ended up in the book that changed how America talks about race.

That young teacher went on to become W.E.B. Du Bois: co-founder of the NAACP, the first Black American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, and the author of The Souls of Black Folk. Those rural Tennessee summers shaped his thinking and later appeared in The Souls of Black Folk.

Du Bois arrived at Fisk University in Nashville in 1884, fresh from the integrated schools of western Massachusetts. The contrast with the Jim Crow South was immediate and total. As was customary for Fisk students, he taught during the summers and found a post at Wheeler School near Watertown in rural Wilson County.

The school was called Wheeler School. The building was a former corn crib. He taught there for two months in the summer of 1886, then came back and did it again in 1887. He boarded with a local family near the school and also attended services at Seay Chapel Methodist Church in Alexandria. Wheeler School is the Wilson County setting of his classroom story; Seay Chapel is the documented DeKalb County connection.

There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the rough benches, their faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare and swinging, the eyes full of expectation...

W.E.B. Du Bois · The Souls of Black Folk (1903) · writing about his rural Tennessee classroom

When Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, he gave a whole chapter to his Tennessee summers. The chapter is called "Of the Meaning of Progress," and it's one of the most quietly devastating things he ever wrote — a meditation on what progress means when the people experiencing it have nothing to show for it, told through the faces of his students and the families he stayed with in these hills.

He writes about the beauty of the countryside. He writes about the hope in his students' eyes. And he writes about riding the Jim Crow car back to Nashville at summer's end, trying to make sense of what he'd seen. Years later, he returned to the area and learned that his favorite student — a girl named Josie — had died. Her brother had fled to escape debt arrangements that trapped Black families in a cycle that looked a lot like what had supposedly just ended. The schoolhouse had been replaced. Almost nothing else had changed.

That gap — between what Reconstruction promised and what rural Black families received — helped shape one of the fiercest civil rights voices in American history.

Little Lake House Tip The chapter "Of the Meaning of Progress" from The Souls of Black Folk is less than twenty pages and available free online (the book is in the public domain). It's a remarkable read anywhere, and especially meaningful while visiting the broader Middle Tennessee region that shaped these formative experiences.

If you're not deep into American history, here's the short version: W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most consequential thinkers the United States ever produced. He was the first Black American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. He co-founded the NAACP in 1909. He edited The Crisis, a magazine that reached 100,000 readers by 1920 and documented lynching, segregation, and the ongoing theft of Black civil rights with a directness that was radical at the time.

He introduced ideas into American culture that we still use every day — "double consciousness," the feeling of moving through the world as two people at once, one seen through your own eyes and one through the distorting lens of racism. He argued fiercely against Booker T. Washington's position that Black Americans should accept second-class status in exchange for incremental economic progress. He said: no, full rights, and now.

He died in 1963 in Ghana, at age 95 — one day before Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington. He'd lived long enough to see the movement he helped start transform the country, and to grow frustrated that it hadn't gone far enough.

All of that traces back, in part, to two summers teaching in rural Wilson County and to his wider experiences in Middle Tennessee.

If you're the kind of guest who likes mixing history with the lake trip, there are a few easy ways to connect with this story while you're here.

Watertown and rural Wilson County are the documented setting of Wheeler School; the original schoolhouse no longer stands. Alexandria, TN, about 20 minutes north of Smithville, provides the documented DeKalb County connection through Seay Chapel, where Du Bois attended services.

Fisk University in Nashville is about an hour from the cabin — the same drive that brings most guests out here. Du Bois's papers are in the university library. The campus is a National Historic District. If you're planning a Nashville day, it's worth building in an hour there. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, who have been performing since 1871 and were part of the Fisk Du Bois knew, still perform.

And of course, The Souls of Black Folk itself is in the public domain and free everywhere online. The cabin has books — but this one you can read on your phone from the hammock if you want. Start with chapter four.

Little Lake House Reading List The Souls of Black Folk (1903) — free online everywhere, chapter four is the DeKalb County chapter. For the full Du Bois story, David Levering Lewis wrote the definitive two-volume biography; the first volume covers his Tennessee years in detail. Both are available at the Smithville Public Library.

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We talk a lot on this site about what makes this corner of Tennessee worth the drive — the lake, the waterfalls, the quiet, the fact that Puckett's Point is right there and most people don't know about it. All of that is real.

This part of Middle Tennessee has layers. One of the most important thinkers in American history taught near Watertown in Wilson County and attended church in Alexandria in DeKalb County. He carried the lives of his students—and what their experiences revealed about American progress—with him for the rest of his life.