Sloss House, originally known as The Pines, was built in 1883 and first served as a residence for faculty and university administrators before later housing university departments. Thomas Sloss, Iowa State University's superintendent of buildings from 1909 to 1935, moved there with his family in 1925, and the house was named for him as its longest resident. Today it houses the Margaret Sloss Center for Women and Gender Equity, founded in 1981 to advance the social and academic well-being of women and underserved populations on campus. Thomas Sloss's daughter, Dr. Margaret Wragg Sloss, who was born in 1901 and died in 1979, became the first woman to graduate with a Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from Iowa State University in 1938 and the twenty-seventh woman in the United States to do so. She championed women's rights, pressed for changes in veterinary school admissions to allow women, was invited to the White House by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1944 for her contributions to veterinary science, founded the Women's Veterinary Medicine Association in 1947 and served as its president for two years, and was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 2006.