Wheeler School
Tennessee
Fiddlers Grove Historic Village
945 E Baddour Pkwy
Lebanon, TN 37087
United States
This heritage site is a part of the American Battlefield Trust's Road to Freedom: Tennessee Tour Guide app, which showcases sites integral to the Black experience during the Civil War era. Download the FREE app now.

During the summers of 1886 and 1887, W.E.B. Du Bois taught 30 African American students in rural Wilson County during the Reconstruction period, shaping his future as an influential scholar and civil rights leader.
Du Bois grew up in Massachusetts but travelled south to attend Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn. He joined other Fisk students at a Teachers’ Institute here in Lebanon. Afterward, a young woman named Josie, eager to learn, encouraged him to reopen the schoolhouse near Watertown, which had once been Confederate Captain Wheeler’s corn crib. He accepted the position.

For two summers he lived 'in this little world,' where students 'read and spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to stories of the world beyond the hill.'" He lived in their rough cabins, worshiped where “the soft melody and mighty cadences of Negro song fluttered and thundered,” and learned more about “the Veil that hung between us and Opportunity.”

When Du Bois returned ten years later, he discovered that Josie had passed away, and the old log school had been replaced by a symbol of "Progress"—a small, “jaunty board house, about twenty by thirty feet, with three windows and a door that locked." The county now owned the land, and students came regularly to the schoolhouse where “the blackboard had grown by about two feet.” But when telling this story in The Souls of Black Folks (1903), he concluded:
How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure,—is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?
Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.”
Nearly a century after Du Bois visited the new school, Black students from Tennessee Tech joined with the Sons of Confederate Veterans and others to locate the decaying schoolhouse and help place a state marker out on U.S. 70 at Goose Creek Road. The Wilson County Civic League removed and reconstructed Wheeler School in Fiddlers Grove, where you can reflect on “Progress” as you consider its influence on Du Bois' life and work before and after the Reconstruction era.
Know Before You Go
If interested in seeking out the marker referenced above, it is at the intersection of Nashville Highway (U.S. 70) and Goose Creek Road, on the right when traveling east on Nashville Highway. (Alexandria, TN 37012)