The Ridge House was built about 1836 and is the oldest known building still standing in Fayetteville.
Sarah Bird Northrup Ridge, widow of John Ridge, a Cherokee leader who was slain during intertribal conflict, purchased the house in 1840 and moved her family out of the Indian Territory to Fayetteville.
Sarah Ridge helped organize the nearby Fayetteville Female Seminary a block south on Mountain Street, where a historic marker commemorates its location.
Her son, John Rollin Ridge, later a poet, newspaper editor and the first known Native American to publish a novel, grew up in the house and gained his early education in Fayetteville.
Her granddaughter, Alice Polson, was the first-known Indigenous student to graduate from the Arkansas Industrial University, the present-day University of Arkansas.
The Washington County Historical Society purchased the house in 1973 and restored the home. Originally built as a dogtrot with two log rooms, the logs were soon after covered with outside with clapboard and on the inside with lathe and plaster. The result is a building that architecturally has a New England saltbox sensibility, harkening back to the days when John and Sarah Ridge first met in Connecticut.
The historical society leases rooms in the building for professional offices currently.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.