This shotgun-style house was likely built around 1890. The surrounding area was platted in 1848 as the Whitehill Tract, and the house appears on the first Sanborn Fire Insurance map that includes this part of the city, in 1891. On that map the house does have its front porch - it was probably added in the first half of the twentieth century - and a two-story, frame outbuilding at the alley was identified as a "carpenter shop."

The house appears to have been used as a rental throughout much of its early history, with a variety of tenants who worked at a range of professions including dressmaker, express agent for the interurban railway, postal carrier, telephone operator and laborer at the Wood Mosaic Company.