This three-part house was built for Caleb Tate, an early clerk of the Franklin County Court and a native of Lynchburg. Tate may have imported the house's master mason from his hometown's noted craftsmen. The placement of Mount Pleasant on the highest spot in the town is typical of the siting popularized by Jefferson, whose influence, one way or the other, reached all across Virginia. Following a fire in 1856, many of the house's Federal elements were replaced by Greek Revival ones, including the wide wooden cornice and a low deck-on-hip roof with hipped-roof wings. A Doric porch with a second-story balcony spans the facade of the two-story section. Like most of these three-part houses with a two-story central block and one-story wings, it has a lateral front hall that gives access to both wings and to one of the two rooms behind it. During the Civil War, the family of Governor Henry A. Wise took refuge here. The house served as a boarding school for young girls in the latter part of the nineteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was sold to John Penn Lee, a nephew of Robert E. Lee.