In the late 1930s, when Emily Hutchinson Meggett was a young girl growing up on South Carolina’s Edisto Island, she would often walk the three-quarters of a mile from her family’s house to her granduncle Henry Hutchinson’s property. There, she and her siblings and cousins would play hopscotch or hide ‘n’ seek.

Sometimes they’d pull a vine off a tree and use it as a jump rope. The adults, including Henry’s wife, Rosa, would sit on the house’s big wraparound porch, laughing and talking. The kids weren’t allowed to partake in the adults’ conversation, recalls Meggett, now 88. “Parents back then, they didn’t talk so much in the presence of children,” she says. “You couldn’t sit in their company. When company comes, you better be scarce.”

From that porch, the Hutchinsons could survey their 10 acres of land and the marsh beyond. They raised chickens and hogs and grew fruit and nut trees near the house, but they relied mainly on Sea Island cotton for their income. On an adjacent plot, Henry, who had been born into slavery in 1860, operated one of the first Black-owned cotton gins on the island. He prospered by selling the refined product to markets in Charleston, about 45 miles to the northeast, until a boll weevil infestation in the 1920s decimated the island’s crop.

Around 1885, Henry had built the Folk Victorian–style house using his own hands. According to family oral history, he had help from a half-brother, Jack Miller, and an uncle named John Pearson Hutchinson. (The latter was a carpenter and unlicensed architect who went on to design Charleston’s Central Baptist Church, believed to be one of the city’s first churches built entirely by African Americans.) The house was said to be a wedding gift for Henry’s bride, Rosa Swinton.

The rectangular, four-room, two-story residence, with its side-gable roof and eaves decorated with stylish Victorian detail, was a good home. It stood on 4-foot-tall brick piers that spared the house from flooding during storms, such as the infamous Sea Islands Hurricane of 1893, which killed at least 1,000 people. As the tempest picked up, around 50 of the family’s neighbors huddled in the jam-packed house, sharing food, singing spirituals, and praying until the storm passed.

Barth was found guilty of manslaughter but appealed the decision and was later acquitted by an all-white jury. Four of Jim’s children, including Henry, inherited his land and built houses on each plot.

Henry died in 1941 and Rosa in 1949. The house was passed down through the Hutchinson line until the 1980s, when it was rented out and ultimately abandoned.

In the years that followed, the strong island winds and sea air were not kind to the dwelling. Its metal roof leaked. Termites and rot took their toll on its pine siding and structural supports. It was in very real danger of collapsing. Emily Meggett would pass by and sometimes wonder if the fragile structure would still be there the following day.

In the fall of 2013, John Girault, the newly appointed executive director of the Edisto Island Open Land Trust (EIOLT), a local land preservation group, found himself driving aimlessly around the island, trying to familiarize himself with the lay of the land. About 200 yards off Point of Pines Road, up a packed dirt-and-grass driveway, he spotted a deteriorating red-roofed, green-sided building, draped with wisteria. He stopped his car and got out. “I thought it was an old barn,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘If I were a photographer or an artist, it’s certainly the kind of place I’d like to capture.’ So I started asking people questions about it, and of course everyone knew it was the Hutchinson House.”

Smith knew that her small organization didn’t have the resources to rescue the home, and the Land Trust was in the business of preserving land, not houses. But Girault thought acquiring the property’s 10 acres would give the organization a foothold on a part of the island where it hadn’t already invested. The house could be saved at the same time.

In November of 2016, aided by the Lowcountry Conservation Loan Fund, EIOLT purchased the property from Myrtle’s son, Steve Esteves, for $100,000. Two and a half years later, it bought an adjacent 10-acre parcel that had also belonged to Henry Hutchinson.

Some members of the Hutchinson family, including Henry’s great-great grandson Greg Estevez (who spells his last name differently from the rest of the family), were skeptical at first, but also relieved that something was going to be done. Girault invited family members to serve on the house’s advisory board, so they could share their memories of the house as well as their hopes for its future.

It’s a particularly important piece of history: While at least 13 of Edisto Island’s original 60-plus plantation houses remain, the Hutchinson House is the one of the few intact late 19th–century freedpeople’s homes still standing. (A slave cabin where Meggett’s husband, Jessie, grew up was transported board by board to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, where it was reassembled and put on display in 2016.)

It would have been a tragedy to lose the house, says Cameron Moon, a curator at Drayton Hall (a National Trust Historic Site in Charleston), who serves on the EIOLT’s Hutchinson House committee. “It is just so impressive. Generally when we think of post–Civil War, I feel like it’s not this grand house that freedpeople are living in. We tend to paint a different picture. The story of this family and the fact that they were able to acquire land and then pass it down through several generations, I feel like that’s a really important story to share. I’m sure there were other houses that were similar, but this one survived because it was in the family for so long. It represents a different side. It’s a success story.”

Before any restoration work could begin, the Hutchinson House first had to be protected from further decay. Late in 2017, EIOLT and a group of volunteers erected a 32-foot-tall canopy over the edifice, and a year later, Artis Construction, which served as the general contractor on the project, donated and installed a structural diaphragm of heavy beams to support its fragile walls. Meanwhile, Girault had been busy raising capital, including private donations from more than 300 individuals. The EIOLT also received grants from the state and the 1772 Foundation, as well as the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, which provides money to protect and restore significant places of African American achievement and activism.

Girault also contracted cultural resources management firm New South Associates to survey the property. Via ground-penetrating radar and survey digs, the archaeologists were able to identify the location of the property’s original outbuildings, livestock pens, one well, and two privies. (The house lacked indoor plumbing until sometime in the late 1970s or early ’80s.)

What the team did not expect to unearth were more than 50 pieces of broken colonoware, earthen pottery often made by Colonial-era enslaved Africans. It became clear that decades before the Hutchinsons owned the land, it was likely home to an African enslavement camp. Further investigations revealed that the property was probably part of a circa-1683 land grant of some 1,500 acres belonging to Paul Grimball, one of the first English settlers on Edisto Island.

“It makes the site all the more significant,” says J.W. Joseph, a principal investigator with New South Associates. “It’s already significant as a wonderful property that reflects the lives, skills, and architectural talents of African Americans in the post–Civil War era, but the fact that it appears to be built on the site of an early African American settlement, and can show the full span of African American history on one site, makes it all the more an important resource.”

The plan for the house’s restoration, as laid out by architectural firm Simons Young + Associates, was to preserve as much of the building’s original exterior as possible. Numerous modifications had been made over the years, so architects used photographs from the early 1900s to glean its original appearance.

Artis Construction essentially disassembled the building’s exterior, painstakingly cataloging every piece of wood while evaluating whether individual pieces could be reused or needed to be replaced. Most of the pine siding was unsalvageable, but workers—all of whom have studied or taught at the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston—were able to preserve or reinforce the majority of the structural elements, which serve as the bones of the house.

Despite its missing windows, leaky roof, and crumbling siding, the house’s interior remained shockingly intact. “That’s the really striking part,” recalls architect Simons Young, remembering the day he first toured the house. “When you walk in it, it’s so well preserved, it throws you back in time. There really wasn’t much that was changed to the core of the house.”

The 368-square-foot first floor contains two rooms and two brick fireplaces, one likely used for cooking at some point in the home’s history. By the 1950s, the elegant wraparound porch was removed, and separate front and side porches were added. Several rooms were tacked onto the back of the residence, probably in the 1960s, but they later crumbled after the house became vacant.

“Words can’t explain the feeling,” says Estevez, 56, who lives in Jacksonville, Florida, but frequently returns to Edisto. “The restoration of the Hutchinson House is an answer to our family’s prayer and fulfills my grandmother’s lifelong wish to see this place become a museum to help educate future generations.”

Greg’s younger sister, Gloria Esteves, who lives an hour away in Ladson, South Carolina, also attended the reunion. She admits that when she was younger, she didn’t understand why her grandmother was so attached to this decrepit old building.