[2] In 1698, the first owner of the property, Heivert Papen, built a small house on the corner of present-day Johnson Street and Germantown Avenue.

There is additional speculation that one of the Johnson family members was quite taken with, and subsequently named the house after, the Swedish author, Fredrika Bremer.

In 1944, a group of local preservationists led by Frances Anne Wister acquired the house and established a foundation to restore the property.

[9] Summer 1999[10] director Andrew Repasky McElhinney shot interiors and exteriors at Upsala as the primary location for his second feature[11] as a writer/director, the period art-horror film, A Chronicle of Corpses, starring Marj Dusay, Kevin Mitchel Martin, Oliver Wyman, David Semonin, Margot White and Ryan Foley.

[12] A Chronicle of Corpses was praised by Dave Kehr of The New York Times as belonging "to the small but significant tradition of outsider art in American movies - films like Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls or George Romero's Night of the Living Dead - that reflect powerful personalities formed outside any academic or professional tradition.”[13] The original camera negative of A Chronicle of Corpses is in the permanent collection of MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art (New York) along with other movies directed by McElhinney.