John Cummins, born in Pennsylvania in 1834 and educated at Unionville Academy, traveled west to Minnesota and St. Paul in 1856, then purchased this farm despite having little farming experience. He frequently exchanged labor with neighbors for sowing, harvesting, processing, and building, and wheat became the farm’s most significant product during the Cummins years. Cummins developed a strong interest in trees, nuts, flowers, and fruits, promoted their cultivation, and became a widely respected horticulturalist who experimented with many plants, shared knowledge through the Minnesota Horticultural Society, and knew figures including Henry Lyman, Peter Gideon, William Macintosh, J.T. Grimes, and E.R. Pond. He planted maples from the house to the river bluff, shagbark hickories on the front lawn in 1869, and orchards north and south of the house that are no longer present, while his diary records cultivation of crab apple, apples, plums, black walnut, walnut, cherry, catalpa, peaches, and 800 evergreens. He also urged protection of native flowers that were rapidly being destroyed. John Cummins married Mattie Clark in 1862; Mattie, born in New Hampshire in 1837 and arrived in St. Anthony in 1858, was a skilled rugmaker, amateur painter, and avid gardener whose plants and paintings were displayed in the house. Built for John and Mattie from 1879 to 1880, the brick house stood at the center of a 300 acre farm for most of its life, and John himself hauled brick, shingled the roof, lathed, and finished the interior with locally grown butternut. The couple had no children but often entertained nieces and nephews from Minneapolis. Cummins kept a diary from 1855 to 1916 that preserves details of daily life on the farm, local travel, trade, house construction, and plant growing.