Through the years, Granger House has gone through a number of changes. The house's wooden trim had been painted white for decades prior to its return to a Victorian color scheme. Both the home and accompanying carriage house have undergone alterations as tastes in design and the needs of the family changed over time.

Significance

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Granger House is an example of Italianate domestic architecture, a style popular in the mid-19th century. Advocates of this style, like architect and author A.J. Downing, considered the Italianate style to be one of several appropriate for suburban cottages and country villas. Downing, whose Country Houses went through nine printings between its 1850 publication and the end of the Civil War, linked romantic revival styles like the Italianate with blissful family life and democratic virtue. Downing and several other pattern book architects concerned themselves with the prosperous middle class and laborers, rather than the wealthy for whom most noted architects designed. Their focus on "ordinary" people changed both architectural history and the experience of people like the Grangers.

Granger House was not originally built as an Italianate home. The oldest portion of the structure was a modest, simple brick house, built on the prairie at a time when function took precedence over style. As the house grew in size and changed ownership, its architectural distinctiveness took form. Unlike the architectural models printed in books, actual houses like this one were expanded and altered as the family's needs changed and fashions evolved.

The brick Carriage House, next to the family home, was built in 1879 after the Grangers became owners of the property. It is also listed National Register of Historic places. Although the family chose to use the same material that was used in the house to build their barn, differences do exist. The simpler massing of the building and the absence of brackets at the eave line, indicate that the carriage house was not intended as a strict adjunct to the house. A frame lean-to addition was built about 1900.

Granger House Museum is unique in the Cedar Rapids / Marion area in that it represents the lifestyle of a prosperous middle-class family in the late 19th century--a family not of great wealth but one, in relative economic terms, not too different than most living in the area today. While the museum is named for the Earl Granger family, residents of the home for nearly a hundred years, it is not intended to serve as a memorial to one family. Information about the Grangers is used to illustrate a fairly representative story of a family who migrated to Iowa in the mid-l9th century and made the most of the economic opportunities they found.