Among the oldest surviving buildings in Greenville County, the John H. Goodwin House began as a two-room log cabin built about 1793 by Robert Cooke. It is significant for its evolution into a two-story dogtrot and finally into the vernacular Greek Revival form it assumed about 1842, when John H. Goodwin bought the house and 600 acres of land. Goodwin family descendants owned the home until 2005. Before the Civil War, the house was the center of a plantation where, in 1860, thirty enslaved people lived in four dwellings. It also likely housed the Orleans-Lima post office during Goodwin's long tenure as postmaster. After the war, the home was a popular stage stop and inn for travelers between Greenville and Asheville, and a relocated store building near the road was likely constructed about 1870.