Former mayor says freedman house adds to Beaufort's Reconstruction Era National Park

I went to the Stokes sisters who owned it and asked if they would sell it or give it to us. No, they didn't want to sell. No, they didn't want us to move it. I said, what are you going to do with it? They said, we don't know. We hate to see it falling apart. The city is after us. And so we went round and round and round. And finally, I had a woman lawyer who has done conservation easements, met with them, and she came up with the concept of the women continuing to own the house, but giving us my organization or an organization, a non-profit, an easement that enables us to have full access to the house and to bring the public in it, to see it. And they'll own it, but it doesn't have a bathroom, it doesn't have a kitchen, it doesn't have electricity, it doesn't have running water, it is like it was when it was. The only thing that's different really is it has a metal roof on just the porch because the slope on the porch wasn't steep enough to use the wood shingles which are going on that. So that's the remaining thing to be done.