Of uncertain construction date, it was the home of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) from 1870 until her death.

[2][3] The Frances Ellen Watkins Harper House stands in the Bella Vista neighborhood of South Philadelphia, at the southwest corner of Bainbridge and Alder Streets.

The ground floor brickwork shows evidence (supported by building documentation) of having been refaced after a commercial storefront had been installed.

Harper's life spanned a great variety of activist causes, from abolition prior to the American Civil War to the quest for women's suffrage and African American civil rights in the wake of post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws.

She was a widely printed writer on these subjects, and traveled throughout the North before the Civil War, and in the South as well afterward, speaking on behalf of all of these causes.