Wheeler School

W. E. B. Du Bois attended services at Seay Chapel United Methodist Church near Alexandria, then a Black congregation and now a community center listed in the National Register of Historic Places. He later wrote about his rural teaching summers in an essay, Of the Meaning of Progress, collected in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. The essay treats a one-room schoolhouse and the families around it as the measure of what education and emancipation had and had not delivered.

What the plaque says

Wheeler School Wheeler School for Blacks was established during the Reconstruction period in Wilson County on land donated by Captain J. D. Wheeler, formerly of the 5th Tennessee Cavalry, CSA. Renowned Black educator W.E.B. DuBois taught at the school during the summers of 1886 and 1887. the original log building was replaced with the existing structure in the late 1890s.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Burgess Falls State Park — 25 mi
  A day-use park on the Falling Water River, where a short trail passes three smaller falls on its way to a drop of more than 130 feet into a limestone gorge.
• Stones River National Battlefield — 26 mi
  The Murfreesboro battlefield of December 1862, with a national cemetery built by Black soldiers, a Trail of Tears route and the story of the freedmen's settlement called Cemetery.
• Wynnewood State Historic Site — 27 mi
  A National Historic Landmark log inn at the Bledsoe's Lick springs, beside a Mississippian mound center and tied to the domestic slave trade.
• Rock Island State Park — 29 mi
  A park where the Collins, Rocky and Caney Fork rivers meet at the head of Center Hill Lake, with a gorge of waterfalls below a 1917 dam and the remains of a cotton-mill town.

More markers nearby

• DeKalb County Fair — 0.3 mi
• Morgan's Ohio Raid June 11, 1863 — 1.2 mi
• Wilson Lawrence Waters — 5.1 mi
• Adam Dale — 6.3 mi