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 walked the rural roads just north of here, teaching the children of formerly enslaved families out of a tiny schoolhouse near Alexandria. 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. DeKalb County — this county — is woven all the way through it.

Du Bois arrived at Fisk University in Nashville in 1885, fresh from the integrated schools of western Massachusetts. The contrast with the Jim Crow South was immediate and total. To fund his studies, Fisk placed students in rural teaching posts during the summers. Du Bois earned his teaching certificate at an institute in Lebanon, hit the roads of Middle Tennessee looking for a school, and found one near Alexandria in DeKalb 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, attended services at Seay Chapel Methodist Church in Alexandria, and walked the same ridgeline landscape that guests see today from the cabin deck — before Center Hill Lake existed, before the Caney Fork was dammed, when the valley was still open farmland.

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 this county promised and what it delivered — is what turned a promising sociologist into one of the fiercest civil rights voices in American history.

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 in DeKalb County.

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.

Alexandria, TN is about 20 minutes north of Smithville. The Wheeler School no longer stands — Du Bois himself described finding it replaced on a return visit — but the area around Alexandria is still rural and quiet, recognizable as the DeKalb County landscape he wrote about.

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.

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.

But this county has layers. One of the most important thinkers in American history walked these hills as a teenager, slept in a farmhouse not far from where the lake now sits, and taught children whose world he carried with him for the rest of his life. The next time you watch the sunrise come up over the Highland Rim from the deck, that's worth a thought too.