Walking Through History:
An African American Heritage Tour of DeKalb County

The Land Before the Lake: Slavery in DeKalb County

Before there was a Center Hill Lake, before there was even a DeKalb County, enslaved African Americans were working this land. When the first white settlers pushed into what would become DeKalb County in the early 1800s, many brought enslaved people with them. Plantation owners established themselves along the fertile bottomlands of the Caney Fork River — the very river now dammed to create the lake outside your window — and the labor of enslaved people cleared fields, built homes, and made those plantations productive.

By the time the Civil War began, African Americans made up roughly 10 percent of DeKalb County's population. They were not a footnote in this county's history. They were foundational to it.

One of the most powerful figures connected to the county's enslaved population was Abraham Overall, a Virginia settler who arrived near present-day Liberty around 1805. Overall reportedly held many enslaved people on a large plantation, and the cave on his land — Overall Cave — still bears his name today. Enslaved men and women likely worked to mine saltpeter, the key ingredient in gunpowder, from the cave's walls. It is the county's oldest place-name, and it carries that weight.

Smithville & the Courthouse Square

Downtown Smithville, DeKalb County Seat

Pull into the square in Smithville and you'll find a pleasant small-town courthouse surrounded by shops and restaurants. But in the years immediately after the Civil War, this square was a site of extraordinary tension and fragile hope.

When the war ended in 1865, the federal government created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands — the Freedmen's Bureau — to manage the enormous, complicated transition from slavery to freedom. Bureau agents negotiated labor contracts between formerly enslaved people and white employers, established schools, provided food and medical care, and did something that may seem simple but was anything but: recorded the legal marriages of Black Tennesseans.

During slavery, marriages between enslaved people had no legal standing. Couples had been separated by sale, by the death of enslavers, by the casual cruelties of the system. After emancipation, freedmen and freedwomen came to courthouses across Tennessee to formalize their unions — to make permanent something that had always been fragile. When you stand in front of that courthouse, consider what it meant for a freedman and his partner to walk up those steps for the first time: not as property, not as subjects, but as citizens with a legal claim to each other.

The road was not smooth. Tennessee passed its first Jim Crow law in 1875, and the decades that followed brought school segregation, voting restrictions, and the constant threat of racial violence. But the community endured. Churches were rebuilt. Children were educated. Families stayed and made their lives here among these hills, on this river, in this land.

Seay Chapel United Methodist Church: Where W.E.B. Du Bois Heard God

Alexandria, Tennessee · National Register of Historic Places

If there is a single landmark in DeKalb County that connects to the broadest sweep of American history, it is Seay Chapel United Methodist Church in the small town of Alexandria — a former African American congregation now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

What makes it extraordinary is who once sat in its pews.

In the summer of 1886, an eighteen-year-old student from Fisk University in Nashville arrived in this part of Tennessee looking for a school to teach. His name was W.E.B. Du Bois — and he would go on to become one of the most important intellectuals and civil rights leaders in American history: a Harvard-educated sociologist, historian, and co-founder of the NAACP.

But in the summer of 1886, he was just a young man from Massachusetts who had earned his teaching certificate at a summer institute in Lebanon, Tennessee, and was walking the rural roads looking for children who needed a teacher. He found them a few miles beyond Watertown, near Alexandria, in a tiny log corn crib repurposed as a schoolhouse. His salary was $28 a month. His students — about thirty of them — were the children of former slaves.

Du Bois taught those children for two summers. One of his students — a young woman he called "Josie" in his writing — became a symbol for him of everything both beautiful and heartbreaking about Black life in the rural South. When he returned to the area years later and learned that Josie had died, the grief he felt found its way onto the page.

During those summers, Du Bois attended services at Seay Chapel. In The Souls of Black Folk — the 1903 masterwork that remains one of the greatest books ever written about American race — Du Bois describes witnessing the power of Black religious worship in rural Tennessee, the way faith had sustained a people through suffering that would have destroyed lesser spirits. Seay Chapel was not an abstraction. It was this specific building, in this specific town. What he heard and felt inside it changed the course of American letters.

Liberty & the Battle That Came to Its Doorstep

Liberty, Tennessee · DeKalb County's Oldest Town

Liberty is DeKalb County's oldest town, founded in 1797. But the name takes on deeper resonance when you consider the African Americans who lived in and around it in the decades after the Civil War — people for whom liberty was not an inherited right but a hard-won reality that could be snatched away at any moment.

The Civil War came close to Liberty. In April 1863, the Battle of Snow's Hill — engaging roughly two thousand men on each side — was fought in the surrounding countryside. Unlike many Tennessee counties that sent men almost exclusively to the Confederacy, DeKalb County supplied nearly as many Union troops as Confederate ones, reflecting the complex loyalties of hill-country Middle Tennessee, where many small farmers had no stake in preserving slavery and no love for the plantation aristocracy.

For the freedmen and freedwomen who emerged from slavery in 1865, that divided politics both helped and complicated their lives. Some white residents were more sympathetic to Black rights than in the Deep South. Others were not. What African American families built in Liberty and the surrounding areas after the war were the kinds of institutions every community needs: churches, schools, and mutual aid societies — often built from nothing, on land they had worked but never owned.

The Churches: Pillars That Still Stand

Throughout DeKalb County, African American churches remain some of the most important physical connections to the county's Black history. They were, in the years after emancipation, far more than houses of worship. They were schools when there were no Black schools. They were meeting halls when Black residents had nowhere else to gather. They were places where the community debated its future, mourned its losses, and celebrated its survival.

Tennessee enacted more than twenty Jim Crow laws between 1866 and 1955 — six requiring school segregation, four outlawing interracial marriage, and more mandating separation on railroads and in public accommodations. The Black church became the one institution that African Americans controlled entirely. The one place where no white overseer set the agenda.

As you drive the roads of DeKalb County, look for the historic African American congregations still active in Smithville, Alexandria, and the surrounding communities. Many of them trace their origins directly to the years immediately after emancipation, when freedpeople built the first structures they could truly call their own.

What the Lake Remembers: Displacement & Erasure

Before you end your day and return to the water, consider one more chapter in DeKalb County's African American history — one that is literally submerged.

When the Army Corps of Engineers built Center Hill Dam and the rising waters of the Caney Fork River began filling the valley in 1948, they swallowed 18,000 acres of land. Within months, dozens of rural communities — Cove Hollow, Indian Creek, Holmes Creek, Mine Lick, Second Creek, Falling Water — were gone beneath the surface. Farms, barns, schools, and churches disappeared. Cemeteries were relocated, the bodies exhumed and moved to higher ground.

Among those displaced were African American families who had lived along the Caney Fork for generations. For Black families in rural Middle Tennessee, land was not just an economic asset — it was proof of survival, evidence that something had been built out of nothing after slavery. Losing that land to a federal reservoir project meant losing a kind of rootedness that could not simply be replaced.

The lake is beautiful. It is also a place of memory. Both things are true, and holding them together is part of what it means to really know a place.

A Heritage Day-Trip from The Little Lake House

Here's a suggested itinerary — all of these stops are within 20 minutes of the house.

Resources for Further Exploration

• Justin Potter Library — Alexandria, TN Local history and genealogy collections, including records specific to African American families in DeKalb County.
• Tennessee State Library and Archives — Nashville Holds Tennessee Freedmen's Bureau records, African American death certificates, and genealogical resources for tracing Black families across the state.
• FamilySearch.org — Free Online Digitized Tennessee Freedmen's Bureau records including marriage registrations, labor contracts, and complaints. Search by county.
• Tennessee Encyclopedia Online — tennesseeencyclopedia.net Scholarly articles on DeKalb County history, W.E.B. Du Bois's time in Tennessee, and the broader context of African American life in the state.
• The Souls of Black Folk — W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) Chapter Four, "Of the Meaning of Progress," tells the story of Du Bois's summers teaching near Alexandria. Free at Project Gutenberg. Read it before visiting Seay Chapel.