The house was built circa 1855 for Dr. Lycurgus B. Walton, a physician and slaveholder.[2] His son, Martin Atkinson Walton, graduated from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and took over his father's medical practice in the house.[2] He lived there with his wife, Elizabeth Henry Woodard, and their six children.[2] One of his daughter, Eva, married John Bynum Wiggins, and the farm was subsequently inherited by their descendants.[2] By the 1980s, the owner was John Bynum Wiggins III, and the farm was used for "livestock cattle, soybeans, tobacco, corn and wheat."[2]