The House of the Black Burghardts was W.E.B. Du Bois's first remembered home and the birthplace of his mother and her nine brothers and sisters. Du Bois recalled it as the center of his world, a simple, square, low house with a great room and fireplace, a flagged kitchen half a step below, a lower woodshed beyond, steep strong stairs to the second floor, and a brook, a well, and a mighty elm outside. The outlines of the house are marked by stakes, with the kitchen and woodshed to the right and the stairs between them. On the left are the remains of the new chimney Du Bois built for his ancestral fire tongs in his hoped-for summer cottage in the Berkshires. Since 1983, archaeological investigations at the homesite, combined with the Du Bois Papers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, have been used to reconstruct the lives of six generations of Du Bois's family and to show the many ways African Americans built New England. Du Bois linked the house and its great fireplace to generations of his family, naming old Tom, his son Jack, his grandson Othello, and himself, and imagined his family's old iron tongs restored to the fire in the rebuilt house on Egremont Plain.

Photo: Cosmos Mariner

Photo: Christopher Douyard, Department of Anthropology, University of Mass. Amherst

Photo: Christopher Douyard, Department of Anthropology, University of Mass. Amherst

Photo: Courtesy Rachel Fletcher

Photo: Special Collections & University Archives, University of Mass. Amherst

Photo: W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Mass. Amherst

Photo: Cosmos Mariner