Welcome to the family, skousen
What I would do is create a single folder to load all the web content into and use cPanel's Web Protect feature on that folder.
Then you can create an index.html page in your "public_html" folder that contains a link to access the web protected area.
When you access the folder www.******/newfolder/ it will open a login box.
You can add the login/password combinations using the web protect feature.
Someone else may have a different way of doing it.