Why one grandmother’s house has become a national cause

For Tracey Love Graves, the childhood memory has the gauze of a fairytale: crossing the causeway at night, a turn down a gravel road, massive oak branches reaching across the car like claws in the moonlight.

Ms. Love Graves, a film actress, arches her arms and fingers into a canopy as she tells the story. Trepidation, she says, turned to relief when the car slipped into the driveway of the island homestead of Josephine Wright, her grandmother.

That formative sense of shelter runs strong for Ms. Love Graves, the youngest of Ms. Wright’s 40 grandchildren. Today, however, the oaks along the road have long been felled along with much of the maritime forest in which she played as a child. The threat now, she says, is no longer in her imagination. It is a developer suing Ms. Wright, who is now in her 90s, in a bid, the family believes,