Montgomery Gilbreath had this board-and-batten house constructed before the Civil War, probably from one of the published house plans of landscape gardener and architect A.J. Downing of Newburgh, New York. Gilbreath was elected probate judge of Marshall County in 1850 and served until 1862, then joined the Confederacy and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel with the 49th Alabama Infantry. When Yankees invaded Guntersville in 1865 and began burning it, several leading townsmen, including Gilbreath, met Federal officers and pleaded that the city be spared. Because of their intervention, and perhaps because Gilbreath was a Mason like the commander of the Federal forces, this house was one of only seven buildings spared, although it suffered slight damage from a Yankee cannonball fired from a bluff north of the river. Gilbreath was also active in the town’s business and political affairs, serving in 1857 as a trustee of the proposed Tennessee and Coosa Railroad and as a delegate to the 1876 State Constitution Convention. Born in 1814 in East Tennessee, he married Temple Jane Kilfoyle in 1844, and they had ten children: Mary, Sally, Emmet, Edwin, Gordon, Catherine, Alexander, Albert Sidney, John, and Montgomery Jr. Gilbreath died October 8, 1885, and his wife died January 9, 1898; both are buried in City Cemetery. Several descendants of the Gilbreaths still reside in the area.