Rock Rest's leaky roof will be repaired this month. (NTHP)

An inn for black travelers to Maine before the 1964 Civil Rights Act made businesses accessible to all Americans may become a guest house again.

This month, a study is under way to determine the best use for Rock Rest, a 14-room inn in Kittery, Maine, that closed in 1974. A New Hampshire nonprofit wants to restore the early-19th-century cape and reopen it as a guest house for visiting scholars studying the area's African American history. The roof will be repaired with the help of a $2,000 grant from the National Trust's Northeast Office.

Rock Rest was owned and operated by Hazel and Clayton Sinclair. The Sinclair family still owns the house and has leased it to the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail, Inc., based in nearby Portsmouth, N.H., which is overseeing its restoration. The house, one of the last intact black guest houses in New England, is now part of the nonprofit’s Greater Portsmouth Black History Trail, a self-guided tour of 25 sites.

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