John Green built his first house on the hill overlooking the saw and grist mill that had just been built. Three other houses have subsequently been built on that spot. There are no photographs of any of the houses before the 1853 one, but Maud Green described them in her notes on Dayton, written in the 1940s:

The first house in Dayton was on the site of our present home [marked in map above] and was probably not a log cabin as Grandfather [John Green] had put a saw-mill in one end of the flour-mill in the spring of 1830, leaving his family on the farm four miles up the river until the next Fall, in the cabin 18 x 24 where they had spent the first winter.  They were still in the first house in 1832 at the time of the Blackhawk War as they made a fort of it that summer and had sixty people there just after the Indian Creek Massacre.

I never heard how long it was until the second house was built in the hillside, facing the river.  It had three stories with a spring in the basement floor running into a stone trough, parts of which are still in existence.  The spring dried up long ago but I can remember it.  The upper floor was even with the top of the hill.  It had a porch on the east side of at least one floor.  While the men were away at the California Gold Rush in 1849 the Hite family lived in this house and rented the farm, the only time any but the Green family ever lived here (in 117 years).

In the summer of 1853 John Green & his sons David and Jesse built three square frame houses in a row,  John’s where the first house stood.  In these three houses, the Jesse, David & Isaac Green families grew up.  The Jesse Green house was destroyed by fire within the last twenty years and our father’s house was torn down (in 1924) and replaced by the present structure, which is the fourth house on the original building spot.  The David Green house, owned by Charles and Grace Clifford, is the only one still standing of the three built in 1853.

This view of the third John Green house is from the southwest.

This view is from the railroad tracks, looking east.

This shows the house viewed from the end of the bridge – looking west up the hill.

In 1924 when the house was torn down, the old kitchen was moved across the road to make a house for the hired man.

This is the fourth house, built in 1924.