The Rev. John Madison Newburn, born in 1868 in Mississippi, came to Jacksonville from Neches, Texas, in the winter of 1896 to become pastor of the First Baptist Church. He and his wife Lula bought this property in 1901 from F.A. Fuller and R.B. Longmire, and the house built here in 1903 was a late Victorian residence with transitional classical revival elements, including a two-story balustraded porch and four ornamental gables. The Newburn family developed close ties with Jacksonville College and the community, and when housing at the school was limited, the home served as a dormitory. After Newburn's death in 1926, two Jacksonville College presidents, the Rev. J.V. Vermillion and Deacon B.J. Albritton, were among those who wrote a special memorial record of his twenty-two years as pastor of the First Baptist Church. In 1928, after a fire destroyed the small Newburn Hospital owned and operated by his brother C.L. Newburn, M.D., Lula Newburn offered the house as a temporary hospital until a new facility was built five months later. Newburn heirs owned and occupied the home until Dallas and Thelma Rawlinson purchased it in 1945. They lived there until their deaths, reared two daughters, Joyce and Carol Ann, in the house, and kept it in the Rawlinson family for thirty-eight years, until June 1983. In later years the home served as a day care facility for local children, and in 1994 it was sold to Jacksonville College. The house represents two families who contributed to the development of Jacksonville.