By Phaedra Trethan/Courier-Post/October 14 2016

CAMDEN - Jeanette Lilly Hunt, the owner of a long-vacant home in a blighted Camden neighborhood where Martin Luther King Jr. once stayed, has reached an agreement in principle with a city nonprofit to take custody and preserve the home.

Cooper's Ferry Partnership will take over as custodian of the home at 753 Walnut St., where the civil rights icon stayed as a guest of Hunt's father-in-law, the late Benjamin Hunt, while he was a student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania.

The move will enable Cooper's Ferry to raise funds and begin work to preserve the home, which is in dire need of repairs to its roof and in need of plumbing, electrical and other fixtures.

"I am very excited," the 85-year-old Camden resident told the Courier-Post Thursday evening. "This is like a dream come true."

Asked about the process undertaken by Haddon Heights amateur historian Patrick Duff to prove the home's historical significance — a process that is still winding its way through state and city bureaucracy — she invoked Scripture: "Everything has a season, and a beginning, and this is the beginning."

Cooper's Ferry, she said, had been "very cooperative, their attitudes were just right, and there was a good spirit in the room." The nonprofit will work to preserve the home, and once it's stabilized and its historic status cemented, will work with Hunt to find another nonprofit organization to maintain and operate what she and others hope will eventually become a museum and educational site.

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