Static Website, need to let client edit a small section of it, how to do it?

I'm familiar with CMS's and have used them many times, but this is a static site built before open source CMS's became prevalent. They currently edit it by editing the html and then uploading it by ftp to the server. I'm trying to think if there is an easier way that I can set up to make it easier on them. Maybe a password protected form where they can enter in paragraphs in the text field and hit submit and it will save the text to a file that the html page will read and pull the text from it. I don't know if there is any way to do this without using a database, but thought I would check.

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