It was a delectable place -- simple, square and low, with the great room of the fireplace, the flagged kitchen, half a step below, and the lower woodshed beyond. Steep, strong stairs led up to Sleep, while without was a brook, a well and a mighty elm.

[After a lifetime away from Great Barrington]... riding near on a chance journey I suddenly was homesick for that house. I came to the spot. There it stood, old, lonesome, empty... It seemed to have shrunken timidly into itself. It had lost color and fence and grass and up to the left and down to the right its sister homes were gone...

Then of a sudden somebody whose many names and places I do not know sent secret emissaries to me on a birthday which I had firmly resolved not to celebrate…And they said by telegram -- “The House of the black Burghardts is come home again -- it is yours!

Whereat in great joy I celebrated another birthday and drew plans. And from its long, hiding place I brought out an old black pair of tongs. Once my grandfather, and mayhap his, used them in the great fireplace of the House. Long years I have carried them tenderly over all the earth….But when the old fireplace rises again from the dead on Egremont Plain, its dead eyes shall see not only the ghosts of old Tom and his son Jack and his grandson Othello and his great grandson, me –- but also the real presence of these iron tongs resting again in fire worship in the House of the Black Burghardts.>

“House of the Black Burghardts,”
The Crisis 35, 4 (April 1928): 133-4; The Seventh Son, vol. II (1971), 360.

House of the Black Burghardts Of all his writings, the article by W.E.B. Du Bois quoted above reveals in greatest detail his feelings about the house on his boyhood homesite. He also commented on the property in Ingersoll's 1960 Oral History. In the two-volume Pulitzer Prize winning biography by David Levering Lewis, the author describes Du Bois’ life while he owned the property, as well as the larger social context of Great Barrington. All of these writings demonstrate that just because Du Bois never actually was able to make more than a small beginning at actually restoring the house doesn't mean that this ever stopped being a deeply felt desire. Overall, events of Du Bois' own life and his notions of family and place all made the House of the Black Burghardts and the surrounding locale of great importance to him on several levels. He clearly valued re-connecting the long chain of African American landowners his mother's family represented. In interviews Du Bois indicated that landowning was a point of pride for the race as well as the family.

The area meant safety, too, as Great Barrington was the birthplace of his children and the place his wife Nina and daughter Yolande went to escape 1906 Atlanta race riots. He highly valued the country as a respite from the stresses of urban life under ordinary circumstances, too. And finally, as Nancy Muller puts it in her 2001 dissertation, "he wanted to use [Great Barrington] as a point of entry into understanding the racialization of class processes...."

After living here at his grandfather Othello's house only from the age of two until he left to attend school, Du Bois himself became the owner of the family property from 1928 to 1954. Du Bois was presented the deed to the site as a gift for his sixtieth birthday by Warren H. Davis and the committee for whom he had held it, after Davis had bought it from Lena Wooster, a fourth generation black Burghardt, of Du Bois' maternal family. The Du Bois Testimonial Committee included Clarence Darrow, Mary McLeod Bethune, Moorfield Storey, Jane Addams and other well-known social activists as donors. Du Bois learned of prominent Pittsfield architect Joseph McArthur Vance from James Weldon Johnson, after Vance had worked on Johnson’s cottage in Great Barrington. Vance drew up plans according to Du Bois' wishes to create a gracious vacation retreat from the rather derelict cottage.

Floorplan of Du Bois' house Du Bois described his grandfather Othello’s house as having a living room, kitchen, and woodshed on the first floor, with two bedrooms on the second. Vance’s plans specified one large library/music room, presumably converting what was Othello’s living room. A new porch was to be added, the second floor of which would have allowed a bathroom. A dining room and small kitchen completed the first floor, and would have been created from Othello’s large kitchen. A new living room with fireplace was planned for what would formerly have been part of the woodshed. A planned service wing consisted of a garage with space for wood and coal storage behind it. On the second floor the two bedrooms were planned to become four, plus a bath and two closets. In this plan, the working farmhouse with ample kitchen workspaces was to have become a retreat for occasional entertaining, with additional dining and socializing areas.

Many people were engaged to implement renovation plans. J. W. Wilson, an African American carpenter who lived at 267 W 143rd Street in New York, who came up from the city to work on the house in the summer of 1928, advised Du Bois and did some of the work. Frank Vigezzi, a mason with a business on Van Deusenville Road in Great Barrington, worked on the chimney and cellar. By July, Du Bois tells Vance "I have had a shingled roof put on the main part of my cottage and one chimney built...." Thomas and Palmer, a local building supplies firm, billed Du Bois for shingles, pine board and nails.

Du Bois' house, 1933 A photograph of the house from the summer of 1933 shows a new roof on the main part of the house. It may have been taken during the two weeks at the end of August when Nina and a woman friend apparently stayed at the Sunset Inn on Rosseter St., Great Barrington, owned by African American Edgar Willoughby. It is impossible to tell from the Papers if Wilson completed the rest of the first part of the estimate and also took down the plaster and took up floors. Du Bois turned to Warren Davis, a businessman of African American descent who operated a local lumberyard, to find someone to build the chimney and excavate the cellar. The east chimney was done by mid-July 1928, built by Frank Vigezzi for $298.30, but it is unknown whether other work in the cellar or foundation were done.

Du Bois never says he stayed at the cottage in Great Barrington, suggesting its poor condition. Instead, he seems to have patronized the Sunset Inn, with mostly visits of only one night.

Du Bois’ visits to Great Barrington and money available for the house there decreased in the face of growing national and personal financial difficulties. By 1931 the NAACP was near bankruptcy, could not pay his salary, and was embattled politically in the Scottsboro case. Further, Du Bois disputed Walter White over the organization's direction. It is no wonder that on May 21 he used only one line to reply to C.E. Brooks of Great Barrington: "My property on Egremont Road is not for sale."

In 1932 Du Bois spoke and wrote on the brutal impact the Depression was making on African Americans in the face of Jim Crow practices. Then, after accepting a spring semester visiting professorship for 1933 and resigning controversially from the NAACP in 1934, Du Bois made Atlanta University his institutional base into the 1940s. Any attention at all to his boyhood homesite is amazing. Du Bois requests a property tax abatement in 1934. Ten years later, Du Bois quickly responds to Warren Davis' letter about the house's condition "My house on the South Egremont Road is not for sale and... I want to warn the neighbors or anyone else from interfering with it in any way."

Again in 1949, with Du Bois working untiringly for peace in the early part of the Cold War, Davis asks about selling, but the owner is still fiercely committed to the property.

I have no intention of selling my lot on Egremont Road. On the other hand, I would like to have it put into sightly condition and perhaps have some of the original beams tarred and buried so that I could use them, when I or some of my descendants might want to rebuild. The present structure, of course, there is no chance of saving, and perhaps even the chimney ought to be torn down.

W.E.B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham And as late as 1951, just two years before he will finally sell it, Du Bois drafts a will leaving the homesite to his wife Shirley, even dictating beyond her death that it go to his granddaughter Dubois Williams. So although few dreams for the house were realized, W.E.B. Du Bois steadfastly cherished this symbol of Burghardt family and African American perseverance and tried his best to preserve it.