1509 Smith Level Road, Chapel Hill, NC 27516 - Orange County

The land is beautiful, with a great mix of wooded and open places, a gated and lined driveway, a high flat spot to look down on the fields from, a creek at the bottom of it all. The house is not much, just a ramble of necessity and salvage materials built around an ancient trailer after the house was burned down, but it has its own wayward charm. Somebody can make do with it; the owners did for decades and loved it too.

It fully embodies writer Jay Baldwin's definition of a house, which is ''a skin under which we control the weather.'' Good views too.

There is a well, a septic, a porch, heating and cooling systems, a roof, a kitchen and a bath. Several places to sleep and two big rooms to dance in or have meetings, plus several useful outbuildings and a big deck. There are good fields and big trees and fruit trees and gardens. Lordy, Margaret Brown was a great gardener, and you will see that all around her house and in the courtyard and out in the edges of everything. These gardens and trees just need somebody to tend them and enjoy. Perhaps you.

This property was the home of a couple of heroes, Margaret and Robert Brown, people who stood for something and occupied a place in our regional history.

Look them up.

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