Following a complete transformation by the present owner, this once-forlorn, burned-and-boarded relic now shines as a proud contributor to a handsome row of several Queen Anne wood houses.  It was one of five narrow houses in a row, all completed by the mid 1890s for Dr. Franklin George.  The surviving late-19th century dwellings "march," as it were, down Jefferson Avenue, all created from the partition of a wide lot once attached to the early brick double house just up the street.  That antebellum dwelling at 225-7 Jefferson, still numbered among the city's oldest, was built for Robert Ross whose niece Catherine, and her husband William S. Patton, acquired it in the late 1840s.  Some 40 years later, the Patton estate conveyed to Dr. Franklin George the lot where he contracted for his new income-producing properties, including 253 Jefferson Avenue.  In 1898 his brother Dr. Sumter George inherited the house, which his descendants retained as a rental for half a century.

The earliest known occupants of the dwelling included tile family of A. E. Summerfield, who operated at the time one of the city's leading shoe and boot stores.  By the First World War, and well into the 1920s, it was home to a Danville tobacconist, Ben V. Harvey, and his family.

In just over a year the present owner, no stranger to old house reclamation on Green Street, rescued the Jefferson Avenue house from many years of decay and dereliction.