The City purchased the property and other stately homes on the east side of North Huron Street with the design to turn the location into a Ypsilanti version of neighboring Ann Arbor's successful Arborland.

Local community members boycotted the effort and the event served as the impetus for the creation of the Ypsilanti Historic District.

Much of the collections of the YHS Archives are the work product of former Ypsilanti City Historians Louis S. White and Foster Fletcher.

It also includes a dining room, early twentieth century kitchen, second floor bedroom, a solarium original to the house with a slatted floor for watering plants and a roof vent to adjust the plants' temperature,[1] and a library with a New York City made Tiffany Studios (a separate company from the related Tiffany & Co.) stained glass window originally from the Starweather Ladies Library building just south on North Huron Street.

[2] Among the holdings are family Bibles, maps and atlases, city and county directories, postcards, yearbooks, many Ypsilanti and neighboring community obituaries, news clippings, Ypsilanti newspapers on microfilm, tax assessment rolls, and civil and criminal dockets.