In the “House of the Black Burghardts” (1928) quoted above, Du Bois recalled his family’s ancestral home upon the Egremont Plain. First purchased by his maternal great grandfather, Jackson Burghardt in 1795, the site remained within Du Bois’ family for six generations. The homesite and the immediate land surrounding it was a veritable community of intergenerational, free, land owning African Americans. “[U]p and to the east of a hill of rocks was Uncle Ira; down and to the south was Uncle Harlow….And here right in the center of the world was Uncle Tallow, as Grandfather Othello was called” (Crisis 1928).

For Du Bois, the homesite served as an important link to the past that stretched back to the early years of the republic and affirmed his rootedness in New England. It also tied him to a long line of free, land owning African Americans. At the time of Du Bois’ birth in 1868, only five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, his family members were already free homesteaders for almost a hundred years, certainly a rarity in a time when most African Americans were just gaining their freedom.

While the site connected him to the United States, it also served as a link to Africa. Du Bois remembered an African song, in a language no one understood, sung around the family fires when he was a boy. The song is believed to have originated from his maternal great grandmother, Violet, who was stolen from West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century and came to settle on the Egremont Plain with the Burghardts. The lyrics of that song appear on early sketches of a family crest that Du Bois created when researching his family history. It reads, “Do Banna Coba / Genne Me / Ben Dnuli / Ben D’le.” A connection to Africa had a profound effect on Du Bois in his later years, when he became a key activist in the Pan-African movement.

In a broader sense, these dual connections to both Africa and the United States appear to be an early influence in Du Bois’ conception of the “veil.” In The Souls of Black Folk he wrote, “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world –- a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro...”

Du Bois's Study Du Bois moved from the site into downtown Great Barrington at the age of five to attend school. Yet the memory of the site would stay with Du Bois for the rest of his life. He would often drive past his old home and dream of one day owning the site again. In 1928, this dream became a reality, and the importance of the site is evident in his arduous attempt to renovate the House of the Black Burghardts in the twentieth century.

Today, the Du Bois homesite is an invaluable resource for historical and archeological research. Few pre-Civil War African American homesteads, let alone intergenerational sites, have survived the passage of time. Even less remains from these places in the archeological record. Through past and ongoing research, the Du Bois Boyhood Homesite offers a glimpse into the world and lives of African Americans in New England.