Shortly after his birth in 1930, Ray Charles lived here with his mother, Aretha Williams, and his adopted grandmother, Margaret "Muh" Robinson, until about age five. Known to friends as "RC," he received his first piano instruction from Wiley Pitman, owner of the nearby Red Wing Cafe, and he and his mother later moved into a small house behind the cafe. At age seven, his sight failed and he was sent to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine. The modest wood-frame vernacular house where he grew up was probably constructed in the 1920s and had no electricity or indoor plumbing; meals were prepared on a wood-burning stove, a hand-primed pump supplied water from a well next to the house, a fireplace in one of its four small rooms provided warmth, and open windows and doors let breezes cool the house. Because of advanced deterioration, the abandoned house was scheduled for demolition in 2006, but the town of Greenville purchased the structure, and with a grant from the Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation completed a reconstruction of the house in 2008.