Green C. Duncan, a Confederate veteran from Kentucky, came to Wharton County after the Civil War to claim an inheritance of land. He sold his legacy in order to buy John C. Clark's plantation on Peach Creek in 1871. The core of the house in which Duncan and his wife, Mamie J. Bowie of Matagorda, lived is Clark's central-hall-plan, side-gabled I-cottage with a shed-roofed front veranda, which Clark shared with his enslaved wife, Sobrina, and their mixed-race children. What is unusual about the Clark-Duncan House is that it is constructed of brick rather than wood.
During the century-long tenure of Green Duncan and his son Francis Bowie Duncan, the house was expanded, first into an L plan with the addition of a rear dining room wing on the west, then with the addition of a two-story block containing bedrooms on the east end of the house. The house has an episodic character that reflects the history of its occupation by five generations of Duncan family members. In addition to the ranch house, the site contains several outbuildings as well as a lone tenant farmer's house near Peach Creek, once part of a small village of such houses.