Hiram Penniman arrived in the Walnut Creek area in 1850 and came to own about 500 acres of orchards in the Ygnacio Valley. He built the ranch house for his unmarried daughter Mary, who died of influenza in 1909. The ranch then passed to his daughter Bessie and her husband, Albert Johnson, and farming there ended when Johnson died in 1948.
In 1970 the Gospel Foundation of California, which had looked after the property, gave the house to the City of Walnut Creek. The Walnut Creek Historical Society was asked to run it, and it opened as a museum in 1972. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places, listed in 1985.