Dr. Rufus W. Bailey, a teacher, minister, and attorney educated in New England, came to Huntsville as a language professor at Austin College in 1855. He acquired an eight-acre tract on this site and built a house he named Buena Vista, but its unusual design, resembling a double-decker steamboat, led it to become known as the Steamboat House. According to local tradition, Bailey gave the house to his son, but the younger Bailey and his wife disliked its architecture, and no member of the family ever lived there. Bailey served as minister of the Huntsville Presbyterian Church and president of Austin College from 1858 to 1862. In 1862 he rented the house to General Sam Houston, who had been living at his farm in Chambers County after being removed from the office of Governor of Texas for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. Bailey died early in 1863, and his son, F. B. Bailey, inherited the house. Houston died there of pneumonia on July 26, 1863, and his funeral was held there the next day. In 1866 Dr. Pleasant W. Kittrell, Houston's friend and physician, bought the property, but he died of yellow fever in the epidemic of 1867. In 1873 his widow, Mary Frances Goree Kittrell, traded the house to her brother, Major Thomas J. Goree, a local attorney and Confederate veteran, who extensively renovated it to give it a Victorian appearance. The house was moved one-half mile from this site in 1927 and later fell into disrepair. In 1936 it was moved to the grounds of the Sam Houston Memorial Museum and presented to the state on March 2, Texas Independence Day.