93-year-old woman

A 93-year-old South Carolina woman is claiming a developer is trying to force her to sell the property that has been in her family since the mid-1800s.

Josephine Wright says the developer, Bailey Point Investment, has sued her and her family over three alleged encroachments her 1.8-acre Hilton Head property has on Bailey’s 29-acre housing development, The Island Packet reported.

The company, which built the 147-unit Bailey’s Cove adjacent to Wright’s property, says the encroachments are a shed and a satellite dish, both of which have been moved, as well as the home’s back porch.

Wright believes the lawsuit, which has cost the family over $2,000, is a pretext to get the family to sell her property, which she has lived on for three decades, to the developer.

Indeed, the developers in the suit have raised questions about Wright’s ownership of the land, an issue that hadn’t been raised before construction began. 

The family’s attorney, Roberts Vaux, says that large companies often employ legal action to pressure small landowners into selling their properties on Hilton Head Island.

“I can’t say that that’s what these people (Bailey Point) are doing, but that’s something that I’ve seen in the last 51 years practicing law on Hilton Head Island and in Beaufort County,” Vaux told the outlet. “If in fact that’s what they’re doing, which I don’t know that it is, but if it is, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen it.”

Even though they removed the satellite dish and the shed, the Wrights have refused to alter their back porch, which they claim does not cross onto the developer’s land. 

All they want, they say, is to be left alone.

“I want [the property] to stay in the family,” Wright told the outlet. “This land’s been in the family since the Civil War.” 

— Ted Glanzer