When the parent on the deed dies, the house a Mount Pleasant family has kept since the phosphate days goes to the court in Columbia. A revocable living trust keeps it home.

Mount Pleasant was a phosphate town. The rock was found here in the 1890s, the population went from 466 in 1890 to about 2,000 by 1900, the mining and the chemical plants ran into the second half of the twentieth century, and the last phosphorus furnace shut in 1971. The families stayed. The houses on North Main Street and in the Pleasant district, both on the National Register since 1989, and the farms past the city limits have been handed down, often with the deed still in one name: the parent's. When that parent dies, the grief comes first, and then the paperwork. The house cannot be sold, rented or signed for until the Chancery Court in Columbia says who owns it, through a case a probate attorney files with the Clerk and Master, that costs money, that anyone can read, and that by law stays open at least four months for creditors. In a town of 5,103 people, that is months of driving to the county seat to settle what a parent could have settled at the kitchen table.

The Mount Pleasant estate is usually one of three things, and the trust has to be drawn for the one you have. The first is the old house in town. If it is on the Downtown Historic Overlay's property list, the Certificate of Appropriateness follows the house, not the owner, so whoever inherits it inherits the design guidelines too, and the trust should name a trustee who can live with them. The second is land. A tract of 15 acres or more may sit on greenbelt, with a rollback of three years of tax savings waiting if a sale disqualifies it, so the trust should say who keeps farming it. The third is the house that is not in Maury County at all: the 38474 ZIP reaches into Lewis, Giles and Lawrence Counties, and the deed records, and the estate opens, where the land actually sits. Inside the city a house gets two tax bills, and the median value owners put on their own homes was $244,400 in the latest Census survey. A probate case is a slow way to pass any of it on.

Vanderpool Law is in Franklin, about fifty minutes from Mount Pleasant by I-65 or US 31 to Columbia and then Highway 43, and the first conversation is thirty minutes, by phone or in person, at no charge. Bring the deed, and any will or trust already in the family; we read them, complimentary, and tell you whether an old estate has to be opened before a trust can take the house, and what the whole plan costs, in writing, before you decide anything. The deed into the trust records at the Maury County Register of Deeds, John Fleming, 1 Public Square, Room 108, Columbia, where we record our Maury closings. The papers can be signed by remote online notary in most cases, or by a mobile notary, so nobody has to drive to Franklin. If the price is the thing standing in the way, say so: for a family going through a rough time, in certain situations, there is a trust scholarship.