The story of how a group of citizen researchers worked collaboratively in order to correct past omissions and mistakes in the "European settler" story told to decades of Ellicott City Maryland visitors and residents about a beloved log structure there saved by preservationists. The authors never imagined that in the process, they would discover a small homeowning community of Black and Mulatto families living in Ellicott City years before the Civil War and that a Mulatto man is actually who built it the house for his free family. Which history has been considered to be historically "significant" in the country is at the heart of this book.