[1] Built between 1865 and 1868, by John Sutton, a local businessman, Breezedale has a two-and-one-half-story, twenty-by-thirty-foot, brick main building, which was designed in a Late Victorian-Italianate-style.

Attached to the main section are a twelve-by-eighteen-foot wood addition and two brick extensions.

After the Suttons, the house was occupied by John Pratt Elkin, a lawyer and politician who ended his career as a justice on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, hence its alternate name, the "Sutton-Elkin House".

[2] Since becoming a part of the university sometime after 1915 the house has been used as a dormitory and for classroom space.

[3] Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979,[1] it is now home to the Breezedale Alumni Center.