Joseph Johnson's biography reads like a textbook example of upward mobility on the early American frontier. He was born in Orange County, New York, in 1785, and his family moved to what is now Harrison County, Virginia, in 1801, when he was about fifteen years old. He grew up on farms outside Bridgeport, received limited formal schooling, and educated himself in law - one of the few professional paths open to ambitious young men in the trans-Allegheny region of the 1810s. He was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1815 at age thirty and served there off and on for more than three decades. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1823 to 1827 and again from 1835 to 1841 - a long career in a political world that did not particularly want him in it. The Tidewater establishment generally regarded the western counties' representatives as outsiders pressing inconvenient demands for fairer apportionment, internal improvements, and infrastructure spending.

Johnson built the house in 1818, when he was 33 and serving in the General Assembly. The original structure was a two-story frame residence with clapboard siding, a central corbelled chimney, and a cut-stone foundation laid by master stonemasons of the period. It was a substantial house for trans-Allegheny Virginia at that date - not a mansion, but considerably more than a farmhouse - signaling that Johnson, a lawyer and assemblyman with a growing political career, had achieved the status that a respectable frame house represented. The cut-stone foundation in particular shows the quality of the local craft: more than two centuries later, the foundation is still in excellent condition, having required no significant rebuilding.

Around 1840 - when Johnson was in his mid-fifties and at the height of his congressional career - he had the house remodeled in the Italianate style that had become fashionable in American architecture by mid-century. The remodel added a middle-of-bay rear chimney, updated window proportions, and gave the exterior the characteristic bracketed details that signaled architectural sophistication to visitors. The original 1818 frame and the 1818 foundation were retained; the 1840 remodel was an overlay rather than a replacement. The result is a recognizable two-period house in which both layers are visible to anyone who knows what to look for. The chimneys in particular tell the story: the central corbelled one of 1818 belongs to the simpler federal-period house; the rear bay chimney of 1840 belongs to the Italianate remodel.

Johnson's election as governor in 1852 was the result of a decade of slow political change in Virginia. The Virginia Constitution of 1851 had broadened the franchise and reapportioned the legislature to give the western counties more representation than they had previously held. The 1851 reform gave the western Virginia electorate genuine political weight for the first time. Johnson, the senior elder statesman of the trans-Allegheny region, was the obvious candidate. He won by a substantial margin. He served the single four-year term then permitted by the Virginia constitution and presided over a period of relative political quiet - the storm of secession was still nearly a decade away. He returned to Bridgeport at the end of his term in 1856. When Virginia seceded in 1861 and the western counties broke away to form West Virginia, the elderly Johnson, who was a slaveholder and a Democrat by inclination, sided with the Confederacy. He died in 1877 and is buried in Bridgeport.

The Governor Joseph Johnson House - Oakdale - was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. It still stands on its original half-acre lot in Bridgeport, bordered now by streets that record its history: Johnson Avenue on the north, Oakdale Avenue on the west, Maple Street on the south. Bridgeport has grown considerably in the past century from a small farm town into a substantial Harrison County suburb of Clarksburg; the suburban development of Emily Drive runs not far from the house. Yet the house and its lot have survived intact - a small, dignified two-period frame residence that records both the early-frontier and the antebellum chapters of an important West Virginia political career. The house is privately owned and not regularly open to the public, but the exterior is visible from the surrounding streets, and the historical marker explains the significance of the man who built it.