Authors including Mark Twain, Henry James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich visited the Howells in this house, as did President James Garfield, and Helen Keller lived there afterwards while attending school.

As early as August 1872, William Dean Howells wrote to his brother-in-law that he had purchased land on Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts for 33 cents per square foot.

Without Mrs. Howells, however, they found it "dreadful in its ghostliness and ghastliness" and, further, that the area had become noisy since the addition of two trolley lines nearby.

[5] Before moving to the Concord Avenue house, the Howells family had lived in other Cambridge homes.

In recent times, this house fell into very serious disrepair, but was in 2011 restored by a local historic-restoration-specialist builder, after consultations with the City of Cambridge Historical Commission.