The site of the Bodine-Carkhuff House was part of property acquired by Isaac Bodine in the early 1700s, and church records place this farmer of French Huguenot descent in the neighborhood by 1723, possibly as the farm’s first settler. A 1766 map provides the earliest evidence of a house there. After Isaac Bodine’s death in 1752, the property passed to his eldest son Frederick, and when Frederick died in 1770 it went to his wife Annetie and their three sons, Isaac, John, and Gilbert. In 1803, Gilbert Bodine sold his share of his grandfather’s plantation to Gabriel Carkhuff, whose father Urbannes had emigrated from Germany in 1740. Gabriel’s son Philip evidently occupied the farm, appearing on an 1808 township tax roll assessed for 189 acres of land, 2 horses, 4 cattle, and a dog, and when Gabriel died in 1820 he left Philip the farm where he then lived. Philip died twelve years later, and his estate inventory of $2,074.94 indicates he was a substantial, if not wealthy, farmer. The farm then descended to Philip’s son and grandson before leaving the family in 1891, and the property changed hands several more times during the 20th century until PSE&G bought it in 1974 for expansion plans connected with the Branchburg Switching Station. The house exemplified the modest dwellings common in the Raritan Valley during the 18th and 19th centuries, blending Dutch and English building traditions in a frame, 1 and 1/2 story, gable-roofed dwelling with a side-hall-plan main block, a smaller kitchen wing with a summer-kitchen appendage, a partial cellar, gable-end chimneys, and lofty attics. Physical evidence indicates the house was built circa 1800, but it incorporated much recycled material, including timbers harvested as early as 1737 and others showing fire damage, so it must have replaced an earlier dwelling on the site.