Tony’s Black History Discovery Hunt | Center Hill Lake - The Little Lake House at Center Hill Lake

Some history announces itself with a marker. Some survives in a church wall, a cemetery pattern, a vanished schoolhouse, a family name or a sentence written by someone who once walked these roads.

This is a place to wander through that history. Start anywhere. Open one story or all of them. The point is not to “finish.” The point is to notice what a casual visitor might drive past.

A quick word before exploring: These include places of worship and burial. Respect posted access, private property and ongoing use. At cemeteries, stay on established paths where possible and do not touch or move markers or objects.

A little context before you wander

Freedom came before equality.

The Civil War ended slavery, but it did not instantly create schools, political power, public accommodations or economic security for formerly enslaved people. During Reconstruction and the decades that followed, Black communities across Tennessee built their own institutions — churches, schools, cemeteries, mutual-aid networks and newspapers — while confronting segregation and disfranchisement. The sites below are local pieces of that much larger American story.

Choose your rabbit hole

There is no right order. Pick the thing that sounds most interesting right now.

Freedom needed infrastructure

The end of slavery was a beginning, not a completed project.

Here is the surprising part: one of the clearest records of Black community-building in Alexandria is a land transaction.

May 15, 1869

Three acres. Three purposes.

Alexandria officials deeded three acres for an African American cemetery, church and school to Black trustees and the Methodist church. National Register research identifies it as the oldest known African American property in Alexandria.

A burial ground protected memory. A school created opportunity. A church provided worship, gathering space and community organization. Emancipation did not automatically provide any of them. Black residents had to build institutions that made freedom usable in daily life.

Find this placeAlexandria Cemeteries Historic District / Seay Chapel

Go to the end of Cemetery Street in Alexandria, Tennessee. Seay Chapel and the African-American cemetery are part of the same historic district.

Open directions from the Little Lake House →

This is a historic cemetery and former church site. Respect posted access and private property.

Flip the idea

What does freedom need besides a law?

Tap this card.

↻ reveal

The hidden answer

Places people control.

Education, burial, worship, information, political organization and mutual support turned legal freedom into community power.

Seay Chapel was never only Sunday morning

A small hilltop building carried a remarkable amount of community life.

Across the post-Civil War South, Black churches often became the first durable institutions controlled by newly freed communities. They provided religious life, but also meeting space, education, leadership and a relatively protected place for organizing.

1868An early Seay Chapel was built on the hill.

1869Land was deeded for the Black cemetery, church and school.

1931The present chapel was erected after the earlier frame church burned around 1930.

1960sThe church hosted political meetings, including discussions about voter registration after the Voting Rights Act.

1998The congregation closed as membership declined.

National Register documentation describes Seay Chapel as a place for singings, socials, community gatherings and political meetings. In a segregated society, a Black church could function simultaneously as sanctuary, schoolhouse, meeting hall and civic headquarters.

Look at it differently

When public institutions exclude a community, an ordinary-looking building can become a piece of social infrastructure.

That is why the building matters beyond its architecture.

A cemetery is a community archive

Sometimes the map of a vanished community is still visible in stone, slope and proximity.

Try this: do not look at a cemetery as a collection of individual graves. Step back and look at the whole landscape.

Who is buried together?How close is the church?Which stones survive?Where are the gaps?

The Alexandria African-American Cemetery sits within the same historic landscape as Seay Chapel and the post-emancipation school-and-church property. That physical relationship is evidence: worship, education, burial and memory were not separate stories. They were parts of one community system.

Look for it hereSeay Chapel African-American Cemetery

The cemetery is at the end of Cemetery Street in Alexandria, immediately connected to the Seay Chapel landscape.

Open directions →

Look closer

What is missing can be historical evidence too.

Tap to see why.

Absence matters

Buildings vanish. Records disappear. Communities move.

Landscape, surviving markers and documentary research can reconnect pieces that no longer stand side by side.

Wheeler School: the little school behind “Progress”

This is not just where Du Bois happened to teach. The school itself became part of how he thought about education, poverty, race and what “progress” actually means.

Picture a young W.E.B. Du Bois, still a Fisk University student, heading out into rural Tennessee in the summers of 1886 and 1887 to teach Black children in a seasonal school.

The Civil War had ended only about two decades earlier. Across the South, formerly enslaved families were pursuing education with extraordinary urgency, but rural Black schools often operated with primitive buildings, short terms and few resources. Wheeler School belonged to that world.

School District No. 13 · Wilson County

A one-room school in the hills

Du Bois taught at Wheeler School in the Alexandria area. His surviving 1886 teaching contract documents his work in School District No. 13. In his later account, he remembered a small community in which school, church, family life, poverty and aspiration were tightly connected.

Du Bois remembered children learning together across ages and levels. They read, spelled, wrote, sang, picked flowers and listened to stories about a larger world beyond their isolated community. The point was not merely literacy. For both teacher and students, education represented access to a world of possibility that segregation kept at a distance.

When Du Bois returned about a decade later, the rough log school he remembered was gone and a better board school stood in its place. On paper, that looked like progress. But he also learned that Josie, one of the ambitious young women he had taught, had died. The contrast forced a harder question: how should progress be measured — by better buildings alone, or by what actually becomes possible in people’s lives?

Stop 1 · Find the original locationWheeler School historical marker

Look near the intersection of Nashville Highway (US 70) and Goose Creek Road, Alexandria, TN 37012. The marker is on the right when traveling east on US 70.

Directions from the Little Lake House →

The school is not standing at this roadside location today. The marker identifies the historic Wheeler School area.

Stop 2 · See the schoolhouseWheeler School at Fiddlers Grove Historic Village

A Wheeler School building was reconstructed at Fiddlers Grove Historic Village in Lebanon in 1994 by the Wilson County Civic League. Inside, the building and artifacts recreate the feel of a rural one-room school.

Directions to Fiddlers Grove →

Fiddlers Grove operates as a historic village. Check its current public hours before making a special trip.

Imagine the room

No smartboard. No grade-level classrooms. No school bus.

Tap to turn the card.

But enormous stakes

Education meant mobility.

For children only a generation removed from slavery, learning to read and write was tied to independence, opportunity and citizenship in ways that are easy to underestimate today.

Du Bois remembered

He described teaching in Tennessee as an experience he would not trade away cheaply — a sign of how deeply those summers affected him.

His Tennessee teaching later became the heart of “Of the Meaning of Progress” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

Then & now

The building story is complicated.

The rough log school Du Bois first described did not remain. When he revisited the community, a newer board school had replaced it. Decades later, a deteriorating Wheeler School building was located, and Wheeler School was reconstructed at Fiddlers Grove. So the roadside marker and the reconstructed school tell different parts of the same story.

Before Du Bois became Du Bois

One of America’s most important Black intellectuals was once a young Fisk student teaching in these Tennessee hills.

Portrait of W.E.B. Du Bois — W.E.B. Du Bois. Library of Congress.

Du Bois arrived in Tennessee only about two decades after emancipation. Fisk University itself had been founded in 1866 to educate formerly enslaved people and their descendants. His summers teaching rural Black children exposed him directly to the gulf between legal freedom and the lived reality of the postwar South.

1886–1887

A young teacher in rural Tennessee

During two summers while studying at Fisk University, W.E.B. Du Bois taught at the seasonal Wheeler School in the area and attended Methodist worship in Alexandria. The original school building no longer survives at the site.

Du Bois later described a rough log schoolhouse with improvised furniture, gaps in the walls and crude benches. He returned to the area in 1897, and his Tennessee experience became part of the intellectual and emotional material behind The Souls of Black Folk.

Find the markerWheeler School historical marker

Look near the intersection of Nashville Highway (US 70) and Goose Creek Road in the Alexandria area. The marker is on the right when traveling east on US 70.

Open directions →

The marker identifies the area associated with the Wheeler School; the original schoolhouse is gone.

Follow the rabbit hole → W.E.B. Du Bois Walked These Roads

Pause here

The interesting connection is not that a famous man passed through. It is that living and teaching in a poor rural Black community helped shape what he later understood about race, education, religion and American life.

Bowser was building an ecosystem

At Silver Point, school, church and print culture came together in one ambitious project.

West End Church of Christ at Silver Point — The surviving 1915 brick building at Silver Point. Photo: Brian Stansberry, Wikimedia Commons.

By the early 1900s, Jim Crow segregation had hardened across the South. Educational opportunity for Black children in rural Tennessee remained sharply limited. Black educators and religious leaders therefore created institutions that served both immediate educational needs and the longer project of developing teachers, ministers and community leaders.

George Phillip Bowser · Silver Point

Church, school, press, community

Bowser came to Silver Point in 1909 and agreed to establish a church on the condition that he also be allowed to establish a school for African American children. That effort became the Silver Point Christian Institute.

1909Bowser established the Putnam County Normal and Industrial Orphanage.

1913It became the Silver Point Christian Institute, teaching subjects including religion, algebra, English, history, Latin and music.

1915The surviving brick building was constructed for combined church and school use.

1959The school ceased operation; Black children were thereafter bused elsewhere in Putnam County.

A second building once housed a printing press used for Bowser’s Christian Echo. So the site did more than educate students and hold worship. It participated in Black print culture — producing and circulating ideas. The press building no longer survives.

Find this placeWest End Church of Christ / Silver Point Christian Institute site

14360 Center Hill Dam Road, Silver Point, Tennessee. The 1915 brick church survives, with a monument near the driveway commemorating the church and school. A cemetery is behind the church.

Open directions from the Little Lake House →

This remains a church property. View respectfully and avoid disrupting services or activities.

One building, many jobs

Why combine a church and school?

Tap to turn the card.

Think infrastructure

Leadership needs institutions.

Bowser was creating a place to teach, organize, worship, communicate and develop leaders — not simply opening a classroom.

Now connect the dots

The most important story is not any single building or famous person.

Church + cemetery + school + printing press + political meetings.

Seen separately, these can look like unrelated historical facts. Seen together, they show how Black communities in the Upper Cumberland built institutions for education, faith, burial, information, politics and mutual support despite segregation and limited resources.

The hidden history is the infrastructure. These communities were not merely surviving discrimination. They were deliberately building the institutions needed to educate children, preserve memory, circulate ideas, organize politically and create community life.

Take this with you

After you know these stories, the roads look different. A small church is no longer just a church. An old cemetery is no longer just a cemetery. A missing schoolhouse is no longer empty space.

Keep wandering

You do not have to finish history.

Follow whichever story stays with you. Visit a place respectfully. Read one of the deeper guides. Or simply notice the landscape differently on the drive back to the lake.

Sources & historical notes

Historic properties can change status, access or ownership. Confirm access before entering any property. Cemeteries are burial places first and historical resources second. W.E.B. Du Bois image: Library of Congress. Silver Point images: Wikimedia Commons / Brian Stansberry; retain applicable attribution and license information.

Stories Hiddenin These Hills