The house was built in the Queen Anne style in 1903 by a prominent Meadow Grove businessman, who made some additions and alterations in the 1920s.

The house is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, as a well-preserved example of the turn-of-the-century Queen Anne style.

Perry Lewis built a dugout on an adjoining quarter-section and, in 1874, planted a grove of cottonwoods and claimed the land under the provisions of the Timber Culture Act.

[6][7][8] Believing that the developing settlement needed a better location, Perry Lewis launched the town of Meadow Grove on his timber claim, platting it in 1886–87 and offering free lots to persons who would start new businesses.

The owner, Virginia native Felix J. Hale, also owned a 400-acre (160 ha) cattle-feeding farm north of the town.

In 1887, Hale offered John Wesley Warrick $100 a month to come to Meadow Grove and manage his operations.

Three years later, he married Grace Shafer, whose parents had moved from Ohio to Iowa before settling in the Meadow Grove area in 1872.

[17] In 1903, John and Grace Warrick built a house on a four-acre (about one-and-a-half hectares) lot at the southern edge of Meadow Grove.

[21] In 1990, the 1903 Warrick House was listed in the National Register of Historic Places, as an "excellent" and well-preserved example of the early-20th-century Queen Anne style.

For the first two decades of its existence, the house's front featured a porch that curved onto the south side, supported by classical columns.

On the first floor are bookshelves, a trestle table, and a writing desk made of walnut taken from trees planted in the yard.

[25] A concrete curbed driveway runs westward from Fourth Street to the carriage barn southwest of the house.