Just off a dirt road in Tallapoosa County and a few feet into a patch of forest lies the concrete tomb of William E. Benson. Most of the land Benson once owned now lies beneath Lake Martin. His home was spared from the rising water only to be destroyed by fire a few years later. The stone remains of its foundation can still be seen on the lake’s southern shore, while to the north most maps of the lake mark the Benson church. But the more evocative monument to this extraordinary man hides a short distance away, down a gentle slope of pines and twisting vines, beyond a long row of carefully planted, century-old crepe myrtles not far from the shore of the lake. Barely visible through the brush stands an old bell cower. A century ago, it summoned youngsters across an open expanse of terraced lawn to the classrooms of the Kowaliga Academic and Industrial Institute, the school Benson founded. Although on the verge of collapse, the shingled walls and quartz foundation of the tower continue to reflect the craftsmanship of the students who built it.
These few remnants of the school and the community that revolved around it offer a spare tribute to the impressive scope of William E. Benson’s life work. Over a period of thirty years, hundreds of rural Black children from across the area received their schooling at Kowaliga. At its height Kowaliga School and its related Dixie Industrial Company controlled more than ten thousand acres and included a prosperous cotton and vegetable farm, a cotton gin and cottonseed oil mill, a general tore, a sawmill, and a turpentine distillery. The community reached its crowning achievement with the construction of the Dixie Line, a standard-gauge railroad running fifteen miles from the school to Alexander City, where it linked to the Central of Georgia. A March 1914 article in the Montgomery Advertiser, and an account in the New York Times later that year, credit the Dixie Line as the first railroad in the nation “conceived, promoted, built and operated by negro people.” Today, the Dixie Line is also gone; only a few stretches of raised rail bed near its terminus remain.
The Kowaliga School grew out of Will Benson’s devotion to his “home community”–a love of the land inspired by his father, John. John Benson was born a la e in 1850. His master was probably James Benson, a Virginian who owned a plantation on Kowaliga Creek. When James Benson died in 1863 at the age of eighty-six, neighbor purchased much of his property. The Civil War, meanwhile, soon rendered John Benson a free man.
By 1870 John was working in the coal mines of the Cahaba Field in Shelby County, yet his memories of a boyhood near Kowaliga Creek would eventually draw him back. Will, who was born in 1873, recalled that his father used to earn about ten dollars a month, and saved as much as he could. In time John accumulated the impressive sum of one hundred dollars–enough to move his family to Elmore County by 1880. And by 1890 he had managed to purchase 160 acres of the old Benson plantation on credit. John Benson had come home, and over time he became a successful farmer. As his son Will described him, John Benson was a thrifty man who “could rum his hand to almost anything.” Through the years John added to his land holdings, acquiring more of the old plantation and taking pride in owning the land where he once had toiled. Soon he ama sed enough wealth to begin lending money to ochers and underwriting mortgages on land in Tallapoosa and Elmore Counties.
John’s success enabled him to send William to study at Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1892. After graduating in 1895, Will could have taken his education north, but he chose to return to Alabama and help his father manage his farm and business affairs.
The year Will Benson came home, at least eight Black men and women were lynched in Alabama. Just a few months before Will’s return, his father wrote to Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute, about “two horrible crimes” that had taken place near Kowaliga. In the first, a group of masked men whipped a half-dozen Black people and then executed a witness to the beatings; in the other, a white delivery man reportedly shot and killed a respected Black employee of the Tallassee Falls Manufacturing Company. The oppression and terror Black people faced locally may have led Will to the conclusion that he could not spend his time “in mere money-making.” He decided to build a new school for the community’s children. Will’s father agreed to donate ten acres and the lumber for a two-story school building, if the community would supply the labor.
Over the next few months, Will Ben on traveled the countryside gathering support. He formed a glee club with local farm boys and held concerts in towns and hamlets across the county, collecting donations at each performance. After bringing in the year’s harvest in Kowaliga, local farmers set to work cutting down trees and firing bricks for the school’s foundation and chimney. It took two year and the financial contributions of seventy local families and several distant benefactors to complete the building.
In 1897 Benson incorporated the Kowaliga Academic and Industrial Institute and recruited a distinguished group of individuals to the board of trustees. Booker T. Washington served for a time. Oswald Garrison Villard also served on the board. Villard, the famed editor of the New York Evening Post and its weekly edition, the Nation, later helped found the NAACP. Another important member of the board was Emily Howland. The parents of this Quaker educator and humanitarian from Sherwood, New York, had been fervent abolitionists; Howland became a key patron of Kowaliga School.
In 1900 Benson expanded his vision for Kowaliga by incorporating the Dixie Industrial Company, launching an “industrial and commercial enterprise which would go a step farther than the school in the development of the natural resource of the community.” Again, Will’s father supported his son’s entrepreneurial venture, donating 540 acres of land. The company, with capital derived from the sale of shares, eventually purchased some ten thousand acres of Tallapoosa and Elmore County timberland and built a sawmill. Before long, the Dixie Industrial Company was turning a profit.
In 1902 Oswald Villard wrote a glowing profile of the Kowaliga School for the American Monthly Review of Reviews. The article, which featured half a dozen photographs, noted the influence of Booker T. Washington on the school, but also made it clear chat Kowaliga School owed “its inception and development” to Will Benson and his father.
The distinctive feature of the Kowaliga School, Benson would say some years later, was its ability to adjust “itself to meet the educational needs of the community.” He sought “to train highly educated leaders or skilled workmen” and “to fit the great majority of its students for the life which they are to lead in the home community, at the same time preparing and assisting those who show greater promise to go to better schools better equipped to give them higher training, either academic or industrial.” By any measure, Benson’s Kowaliga School was an extraordinary operation, but it had its critics, most notably Booker T. Washington. Although Washington recognized the school as a potentially valuable feeder of students to Tuskegee, he and Benson approached their respective institutions with differing philosophies. While Washington sought to train Black people from across the Deep South to succeed in the modern world by training them for practical trades and jobs, Benson concentrated on lifting up the desperately poor Black families who lived within a short mule ride of his Tallapoosa home. Benson dreamed of creating at Kowaliga a self-sufficient Black community based on agriculture and industry.
By 1902 Washington had stepped down as a trustee, citing his disappointment with Will Benson’s leadership and concern about Benson’s handling of school finances. In a letter to Emily Howland, Washington described Benson as “whimsical, spasmodic and rather superficial.” He added that Benson refused to take advice, exaggerated the school’s accomplishments, and spent too much time and money away from the school on fundraising trips. Probably also, Washington was concerned about Benson cutting into Tuskegee’s support network. Both schools relied on the same group of deep-pocketed northern philanthropists for financial aid. The competition did little to counter the men’s growing dislike of one another.
Howland conceded in a letter to Washington that Benson was “young and ardent,” with relatively little experience, but she urged the veteran educator to help Benson learn “the secret of leadership, which is self-effacement, as you have done.” Despite her pleadings, the relationship between Benson and Washington did not improve. In a 1908 letter to Isabel C. Barrows, a Kowaliga trustee and well-known reformer from New York, Washington admitted that his poor opinion of William Benson–first expressed some ten years earlier–had not changed.
Despite the trouble between Benson and Washington, the Kowaliga School continued to expand, and by 1909 there were five “substantial buildings” on the Kowaliga campus, as well as a barn and a small farm with livestock. A staff of twelve provided instruction to three hundred children.
Then disaster struck. A fire broke out in the school’s laundry, swift winds quickly spreading it to other structures. In less than half an hour, the flames devoured four buildings. Word of the loss sparked a surge of contributions from key supporters in the Northeast. The school collected nearly twenty-five thousand dollars, a remarkable sum that allowed Benson and the board to plan for the long term.
Rather than rebuild on the same site, where land was limited and the water supply unreliable, Benson and the trustees purchased a 120-acre tract about a mile north of the original property. Closer to the population center in Kowaliga, Benson estimated that the property was within walking distance of five hundred children. He selected the crest of a gentle hill for the campus, a spot that “commands a scenic view that can hardly be surpassed anywhere.” Construction began in August 1910 and in a year’s time, four new buildings stood on Kowaliga School’s new campus.
By 1913 the school reported an enrollment of over 320. In addition to classroom studies and training in industrial and domestic skills, students participated in prayer meeting , played in a concert band, and enjoyed their own chapters of the YMCA and YWCA. The school library boasted a collection of more than 750 volumes. For these educational opportunities and activities, students in fourth grade and higher paid a one-dollar entrance fee and fifty cents tuition per month. Younger children were charged a fee of fifty cents plus twenty-five cents monthly. Benson proudly reported that another one thousand “ex-student ” remained in the community and were putting their training in agriculture, carpentry, blacksmithing, sewing, and laundering to work in “more useful careers.”
The Kowaliga School received some state support sixty-six cents per student, according to W. R. Banks, who served as principal in 1912-13. It was barely enough, he explained, to employ a single teacher for five months. Banks beseeched all friends of Kowaliga to continue their support. The 1913 annual report of the school listed more than 250 donors who gave contributions ranging from one to three hundred dollars.
Benson’s other key endeavor, the Dixie Industrial Company, was thriving by this time. Benson ambitiously reported that the company’s modern sawmill could produce as much as fifty thousand feet of lumber daily. He bragged that the company’s general store grossed thirty thousand dollars a year and its ginning operation was able to clean and compress three bales of cotton in an hour. Some three hundred tenant farmers and laborers–about thirty of them white–were living on company property. Dixie Industrial Company employed both races, including a dozen clerks, bookkeepers, and supervisors some of whom were, as Benson wrote, “graduates from the best negro schools in the South.” The company also operated as a local bank, making loan to area farmers.
The company’s greatest challenge was moving its products by wagon over fifteen miles of rough road to the nearest rail spur in Alexander City. The dilemma prompted Benson and the Dixie Industrial Company to consider building a railroad. Benson headed north, and with Villard’s influence, secured investors for the project. White landowners along the route embraced the idea and offered rights of way. Investors in Alexander City welcomed the proposal, and a group of eight white business men from the town accompanied Benson to Savannah, Georgia, at their own expense to help the company lease rails and secure transport agreements.
Getting the railroad constructed became even more important following a June 1913 transaction between the Dixie Industrial Company and the Alabama Interstate Power Company, which was planning to construct a hydroelectric dam on the Tallapoosa River. James Mitchell, who pulled together a number of enterprises into the Alabama Power Company, had first visited the Kowaliga School and the Dixie Industrial Company operations in April 1912, after he acquired the assets of Alabama Interstate. He wrote to a business a sociate that the Bensons were in a receptive mood about selling their land, but the building of the dam “will do a great deal of harm to their property and [we] must expect to pay them for it. The Kialaga [sic] district is unquestionably the most thickly settled and best district that we shall invade.” Surprisingly for the times, none of Mitchell’s correspondence or company files from this period mention Benson’s race.
The Dixie Industrial Company agreed to sell a sizable portion of its property in the soon-to-be-flooded river basin, but maintained the right to harvest timber until the water rose. The Bensons viewed the rail line as vital for getting the timber out before completion of the dam on the Tallapoosa at Cherokee Bluffs. By the fall of 1913, the Alexander City Outlook reported that the company had nearly completed grading for the rail line and would soon begin to lay crack. The railroad’s engine and cars were already waiting at Alexander City. “The enterprise of Will Benson in this undertaking is commendable,” the newspaper proclaimed, unusual praise for a Black man in a white-owned newspaper. Indeed, Benson wrote of his symbiotic relationship with whites in connection with the railroad in a 1914 article in the Advertiser:
I have never undertaken anything in my life where I have felt a greater opportunity to help the whites and to be helped by them. In the building of this road we have found a common meeting ground on which we could all stand together and work together without any fear or feeling of social sacrifice.
The railroad began operation in the summer of 1914, and the Dixie Industrial Company began marketing its lumber, turpentine, and cotton across the South and overseas, Germany being a prominent customer. But almost as soon a the railroad began to prove its potential, global events dealt the enterprise a crippling blow. The outbreak of World War I and its impact on Atlantic shipping sealed off much of the vital European market for southern cotton, triggering a price collapse. The events, combined with poor economic conditions locally, forced the Dixie Company to shut down the railroad, its sawmills, and turpentine stills for ninety days and eventually drove the operation into receivership.
By 1915, Benson had apparently lost control not only of the Dixie Industrial Company but of Kowaliga School. The circumstance surrounding Benson’s removal from the school are sketchy, but a dispute with the trustees over finances apparently played a significant role. “His opponents succeeded in deposing him,” is how the Colored Alabamian newspaper put it. But an even greater tragedy soon befell Benson. He died before the year was out.
The details about Benson’s death are as murky as his financial downfall. Only in his early forties, Benson suffered a “lingering illness of three months in which he suffered untold agonies” before passing away, the Colored Alabamian reported. According to the Outlook, Benson was carried to Montgomery for an operation, “in the hope that his life could be saved.” Instead, he died at an infirmary in the city.
Both papers paid tribute to the deceased. The Outlook in a front page article on October 13, 1915, three days after Benson’s death, described him as “one of the best known negroes in the state.” The newspaper lauded Benson for his work at the school and on the Dixie Line and noted that he was once a major landowner, “but according to reports he had lost much of his property in recent years.”
Despite Benson’s death, the Kowaliga School endured for another decade, run by its trustees. It finally closed in 1926, the same year Alabama Power Company completed the dam. In addition to grappling with the school’s financial problems, the trustees knew the rising waters of the lake would cut off children from the Elmore County side of the lake until the bridge at Kowaliga could be completed–information that likely contributed to the decision to close the school.
Meanwhile, efforts were already under way to construct a Rosenwald school a few miles from the Benson community, another piece of information that likely persuaded trustees to cease operations at Kowaliga School. In 1914 Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company had presented a thirty-thousand-dollar gift for construction of a hundred rural schools in Alabama to serve Black children. The initial project was administered by Booker T. Washington. By 1917 the Rosenwald Fund had expanded its efforts across the South. The Rosenwald school near the Benson community was completed around 1927. It effectively replaced the shuttered Kowaliga School. Trustees sold the main school building Howland Hall, and it became the Hotel Camp Dixie, which advertised “fishing, boating, swimming, comfortable rooms, excellent meals, modern conveniences at reasonable rates” on Lake Martin. The hotel later burned to the ground.
The railroad, too, continued to function for some time after Benson’s death. In May 1917, the trustees of Kowaliga School and Dixie Industrial Company sold off additional land to Alabama Power but maintained the right to operate the railroad for four years. At the end of that period, according to the agreement, the trustees were to pull up the tracks within thirty days after being notified by the power company.
John Benson outlived his son by more than ten years. His grave on the Elmore County side of the lake now rests among modern subdivisions. As for Will Benson, his monument lies on the northern side of the lake, on property now owned by Russell Lands. The leader of the Russell family interests in Alexander City, Benjamin Russell, was born in 1876, three years after Will Benson and only a few miles from Benson’s home. He was among several local entrepreneurs who eventually purchased the remaining land and assets of the Dixie Industrial Company. For many years Russell operated Dixie Farms on the site of the old Benson sawmill.
Today, many of the folks who flock on summer weekends to Lake Martin travel right through the land where Will Benson’s school and industrial company flourished. They have no idea of what once existed there. But there are those who do know–the descendants of the children who took their first, real steps toward a better life at the old Kowaliga School.
Top photo: The Kowaliga School’s curriculum included reading and writing, as well as practical vocational instruction. [American Monthly Review of Reviews, Dec. 1902]
This article was previously featured in Alabama Heritage magazine, Issue 76.
