The Christmas Tree House at 305 Heard Street was built as the home of the George Loehr family, who introduced to Elberton and the rest of Georgia their native German practice of celebrating Christmas with a candle-lit tree, and the house took its name from the special role the family and their home played in the history of the city and state. On October 30, 1858, George Loehr purchased a four-acre lot on present-day Heard Street, then known as the road from Petersburg to Elberton, and later built his home there. Local historian Herbert Wilcox wrote in Georgia Scribe (1974) that Loehr and his wife, the former Henretta Leopole, set up their first Christmas tree in their new home to honor the birth of their first child. The lighted candles probably continued the German Christian practice of symbolizing Christ as the Light of the World. During their years in the house, Loehr, a skilled cabinet maker, carved wooden toys to place under the tree and put a small picket fence around it to protect the children from the candle flames. In later years, Mrs. J.F. Ross and Mrs. S.A. Gaines, two of the Loehrs' grandchildren, recalled the tradition their grandparents had established. Mrs. Ross, whose mother was the youngest of the three girls and three boys, repeated her mother's stories of how the Loehr children sat under the tree playing with wooden figures set on a kind of artificial grass, and she remembered visits to the house when she was allowed to see the wooden animals, which were carefully preserved at the time but later lost. Mrs. Ross also quoted her mother as saying that the practice of celebrating Christmas with a tree spread throughout the state in a very short time. Wilcox emphasized the significance of the Loehrs' introduction of the custom to Elberton by noting that their tree appeared there only a few years after the first Christmas tree was sold in New York City in 1851. According to a 1951 article in The Elberton Star, the Loehr family sold the house to McAlpin Arnold and moved to Dewey Rose around 1875. An Elbert County Historical Society brochure (1977) says that Arnold moved the house from another part of the lot to its present spot and that T.O. Tabor, Jr., who lived there later, added a half story upstairs. After serving as the home of the Elbert County Historical Society for a short period in the late 20th century, the house became the site of David Powell's Landmark Realty Company in 1990.