Built in 1857 by Prestonsburg attorney John M. Burns, the house later known as the Garfield Place stood near the mouth of Middle Creek facing the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. After the Battle of Middle Creek, Union commander James A. Garfield commandeered it for ten days as his temporary headquarters while his soldiers camped on the surrounding land that later became known as the Garfield Addition. Burns, though a Union man, fled to Louisa when Garfield’s troops occupied Prestonsburg because he feared that his law partnership with the secessionist John M. Elliott would lead to his arrest for treason. Burns left behind his sick wife Keziah and his son Rowland, and on the evening after the Union victory soldiers broke into the house and stole her gold watch and seventeen dollars in gold and silver coins before Rowland and another youth carried her on a mattress to a flatboat and took her downstream to Louisa; she survived and spent the rest of the war in Catlettsburg, where Burns established a law practice in 1864. Burns later served as Circuit Judge of the Sixteenths Judicial District, while Elliott, a former U.S. congressman, became a Confederate recruiting officer for the 5th Kentucky Infantry, C.S.A., and then served in the Confederate Congress. In the decades after the Civil War, the house passed through several owners until Margaret “Maggie” Leete bought it in 1895 for $450, restored it as a showplace, and made it Floyd County’s first museum and a gathering place for events such as Colonial Teas. Around 1930 it became the residence of Claude P. Stephens and Bess Leete Stephens, who preserved its traditions and opened it to the public on special occasions, and in 1932 James R. Garfield, son of the late president, toured it and judged that a cap and ball pistol found in an interior wall was probably his father’s. During the early 1960s the house served as a stage set for Henry Scalf’s pageant drama The Proud Heritage, and after later transfers of ownership it was demolished in 1982, with its furniture and heirlooms sent to Irish Acres in Boyd County to be sold at auction.