Around 1845, the Irish-born merchant Matthew Crooks built this Greek Revival side-galleried cottage, one of the earliest surviving buildings in the Garden District, as a home for his young bride. He had reached New Orleans by way of New York, but after being seized by gold fever he moved west permanently in 1849 and made a fortune there as a real estate developer, later joined in San Francisco by his family. In 1850 he auctioned the New Orleans home, and a watercolor commissioned for the sale and preserved in the Orleans Parish Notarial Archives showed the semi-rural homestead with an attached five-stall stable extending behind it. After the Tulane Educational Fund acquired the property in 1897, the barn was demolished, and until 1918 the house served as housing for faculty of the nearby H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College. From 1902 to 1912, French-born master potter Joseph Fortuné Meyer, a leading force in Newcomb Art Pottery, lived here. Its present appearance dates from a 1976 renovation that enclosed the front gallery and added a section running parallel with Camp Street.