Robert Smalls entered the world on April 5, 1839, inside this very house. His mother, Lydia Polite, was enslaved by Henry McKee, who was also Smalls's father. The house itself, built in 1843 and expanded over the following decades, is a modest but handsome structure -- a side-gabled, two-story frame building with a broad front porch facing south toward Prince Street. A two-story ell extends to the rear, giving it a distinctive T-shaped footprint. Smalls spent his early years here in Beaufort before McKee hired him out around 1851 to work on the docks of Charleston, some seventy miles to the north. It was there, laboring along the waterfront, that the young man learned the skills of a sailor and harbor pilot -- knowledge that would soon change the course of his life and reverberate through the halls of Congress.

In the predawn hours of May 13, 1862, while the white officers of the CSS Planter slept ashore in Charleston, Robert Smalls fired up the ship's boilers and eased the Confederate military transport away from the dock. He picked up his wife, his children, and the families of other enslaved crewmembers -- sixteen people in all. Wearing the captain's straw hat and mimicking the officer's posture, Smalls steered the Planter past the Confederate guns at Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, giving each checkpoint the correct whistle signals. No one suspected a thing. Once clear of the harbor, he raised a white bedsheet as a flag of surrender and delivered the ship, its cargo of cannons and ammunition, and its passengers to the Union blockade squadron. The act made national headlines and became a pivotal argument for enlisting African American soldiers into the Union Army.

The prize money and a $1,500 Congressional reward gave Smalls the means to return to Beaufort -- not as property, but as a property owner. When the U.S. Government auctioned off foreclosed lots belonging to white residents who had fled when Union forces captured the town in 1861, Smalls bought the McKee house. He moved his family in and made it his home for the rest of his life. His stature in the community grew rapidly. The citizens of Beaufort elected him to the South Carolina state legislature, and he went on to serve five terms in the United States House of Representatives between 1875 and 1887, representing the state during the tumultuous years of Reconstruction. Even after being forced from office by the rise of Jim Crow laws, Smalls remained a prominent figure in Beaufort until his death in 1915, right here in the house on Prince Street.

The house at 511 Prince Street carries the full arc of Robert Smalls's life within its wooden frame. Originally built as a single-story structure in 1843, its porch was expanded to two stories in 1850, and the rear ell grew to match in 1870 -- alterations that track the decades of Smalls's own transformation. After his death, the home passed to his descendants. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1974, recognizing not just the building but the extraordinary story it represents. In 2024, the National Trust for Historic Preservation purchased the property to ensure its long-term conservation. The house stands in the heart of Beaufort's historic district, a quiet residential street lined with live oaks and Spanish moss, bearing witness to one man's journey from enslavement to the floor of Congress.