This two-and-a-half-story house is built appropriately of wood for Joseph Comstock (1860–1894), a member of the Comstock lumber and banking family. His forebear, A. W. Comstock, came to Alpena in 1862 and organized a logging and lumber operation that later became the Bewick, Comstock and Company lumber mill.
With a three-story octagonal tower ornamented with a frieze of carved panels, a wraparound porch featuring a profusion of fine spindlework and elaborately turned posts, the ubiquitous turret, and carved sunburst motifs, the house is an elegant reminder of Alpena's prosperous nineteenth-century lumbering era. Furthermore, the Comstock house illustrates the rage for the picturesque possibilities in the wood version of Queen Anne, as executed by unidentified local craftsmen in Michigan's lumbering region.