The house was finished in late 1871. Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister, had brought his family to Columbia to teach at the theological seminary. The Wilsons lived in the house for four years before Joseph resigned his post. It was the only house Woodrow Wilson's parents would ever own - they were lifelong renters, before and after. Young Tommy Wilson, as he was then known, was a teenager during his years here, between ages thirteen and seventeen. The bed on which he had been born in Staunton, Virginia, was eventually brought to the house and is now part of the period furnishings.

By 1928, the house was scheduled for demolition. A grassroots preservation movement - mostly women's clubs and civic groups - stopped the wreckers and opened the home to the public as a museum in 1932. It became one of the first house museums in South Carolina. For decades it focused on Wilson the boy: his schooling, his upbringing, his early intellectual life. Only a few of the furnishings actually belonged to the Wilson family. The house itself, period interiors, and the artifact of the bed told a story about a future president's youth in Reconstruction-era Columbia.

Historic Columbia bought the house in 1967. In April 2009, a long three-phase renovation began with structural repairs to the aging frame. By 2012, a new support building had been added, with a catering kitchen, restrooms, and mechanical rooms. Renovation finished in 2013. When the house reopened in 2014, its interpretive focus had shifted entirely. The new exhibits used the Wilson family's experiences as a way into a much larger story - the experience of Reconstruction in Columbia and Richland County, as South Carolina and the nation tried to adjust to the new freedoms of formerly enslaved people. The Wilsons' household, like every white household in Columbia in 1871, was navigating those changes. So were their Black neighbors, who had just become legally entitled to citizenship and the vote.

When the 2020 name change was announced, Historic Columbia's spokesperson explained that the new name better described what visitors actually experienced inside. The Museum of the Reconstruction Era at the Woodrow Wilson Family Home is one of the only museums in the country dedicated to the Reconstruction period - those twelve years between 1865 and 1877 when the South was occupied by federal troops and Black Americans briefly held political office, voted, served in legislatures, and built schools. Most of those gains were dismantled by 1877. The story is hard to tell because so much of it is the story of what was taken away. The house on Hampton Street - solid, restored, furnished as it was when the Wilson family lived there - is one of the few physical places where that story is told to American visitors, year-round.