In 1916, Atley Bensen paid $1,200 for precut yellow pine lumber that arrived by riverboat from Jacksonville to build this house for his wife, Clara Christensen. The Bensen brothers married the Christensen sisters, and both were pioneer families of Grant. Atley and Clara lived here with their sons Atley Jr. and Russell until the boys reached school age, then moved to Melbourne, where their son Edward Hartman was born in 1928. The house was rented for about five years until the family returned. Atley and his brother Adolph were involved in commercial fishing, grew pineapples, and operated the Jorgensen General Store, which opened in 1894. Atley died in 1961, and Clara continued to live in the house before later moving to Tampa, where she died in 1981. In 1984, Russell donated the "cracker" house to the Grant Historical Society. In 1985, the house was moved from its original site about 300 feet south of 1st Street on the banks of the Indian River Lagoon to this location, the original site of Grant's first house, built in 1894 by Louis Kossuth "Honey" Smith. The Smith house burned down in the 1970's, and the Bensen House became a museum in 1987.