Odessa began as a Texas and Pacific Railway stop, and the railroad, holding state land grants, advertised the country to settlers. Charles White came from Indiana in the mid-1880s, after his grain business there failed in the years after the Civil War, and his wife Lucy needed a dry climate for her health. In 1887 they built a two-story brick house, simple but well made in the Victorian manner, and it is the oldest structure still standing in Odessa.
White ran a general store and built an irrigation system that the railroad used in its advertising. Lucy helped start a Little Union School, and their son Wilfred became the town's first postmaster. After Charles died in 1905, Lucy moved away, and the house passed through several owners.
In 1923 Oso Pool bought it. Oil had just been found in the county and people were pouring in, so Pool divided the house into a five-room apartment building and started a real estate company that sold lots south of town. The Pools kept the house for about fifty years, and in 1978 the family gave it and six acres to Ector County. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and has been a house museum since 1986, with original furnishings and changing exhibits on Odessa families and West Texas life around 1900.
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