The John George and Susette Bosshard Hafen Home, a 1 1/2 story Victorian eclectic crosswing house believed to have been built in 1881, was constructed largely from adobe bricks made on the property from backyard sand and clay and from reused lumber and possibly other materials purchased from the declining mining town of Silver Reef, about 30 miles north of Santa Clara, which had boomed in silver mining in the 1860s and was being phased out by the 1880s. The house, altered only by the later addition of one rear room, became an important part of Santa Clara's early history as the town's first official post office and as the first home of Santa Clara's merchandise cooperative after Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution was founded in Salt Lake City and similar stores spread through Utah; John George Hafen served as the local cooperative's first manager and stored its goods in one of the rooms. John George Hafen, born in Switzerland in 1838, came with his father and sister Barbara to Salt Lake City in 1861, where he married Susette Bosshard, whom he had known in Switzerland. As new converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they were among Swiss settlers sent by Church President Brigham Young to southern Utah to establish a town on the Santa Clara River. The town site was surveyed within weeks, dedicated on December 22, 1861, and organized with residential lots and vineyard plots assigned by drawings from a hat for a hoped-for grape-growing industry. John George Hafen, his father Hans George Hafen, and Barbara and her husband received adjoining lots and vineyard plots; John George first built a small log cabin for himself and Susette, Hans George built a small shanty, and the family later built and moved into this larger home on Santa Clara Drive.