Charles Miller Croswell (1825-1886), born in New York, was a lawyer and civic leader who served as secretary of the Republican Party's founding convention in Jackson and drafted Michigan's act ratifying the XIII Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He was Adrian's mayor and led both the state senate and house before becoming Michigan's seventeenth governor from 1877 to 1880, overseeing the completion of Michigan's 1879 capitol building. Croswell also helped his guardian and uncle, Daniel Hicks, build the Greek Revival house later known as Croswell House. He and his first wife, Lucy Eddy, bought the 1840s building from his uncle's estate in 1853, and it remained in the family until his second wife, Elizabeth Musgrave Croswell Merrill, donated it to the Lucy Wolcott Barnum Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1927. The Mary B. Hopkins Memorial funded a 1949 addition, and the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.