The outbuildings reflect the various activities undertaken in and around this house - butchering, smoking and salting meats, gathering wood for winter months, preserving foods, laundering clothes and so on. It is notable that hired servants were difficult to find and often unreliable in frontier towns such as Bloomington in the 1830s and 1840s. As a result, most of this work was undertaken by the Wylie household themselves. In 1837 President Wylie invited Theophilus Adam Wylie, his half-cousin, to teach mathematics, natural philosophy, and chemistry at Indiana College. In 1838 Theophilus married Rebecca Dennis of Germantown, PA and brought his bride to Bloomington. They lived in a series of rental houses until 1859, when following the death of Andrew's widow, Theophilus purchased the house and 5 of the from their heirs. Theophilus Wylie's household was often quite large, with six of his eight children growing up in the house (two died in early childhood prior to 1859), and several extended family members living with or taking extended visits to the home over the rest of the century. During this period, the character of Bloomington had begun to change from a frontier settlement to a burgeoning college town. In addition to family, the Wylies took in two boarders at a time, either students or young professors from the college. Likewise servants, absent from the house during the Andrew Wylie period, formed a part of the household during the Theophilus Adam Wylie period. Among them was Lizzie Breckinridge, an African American woman and daughter of a former slave, who came to work and live with the family in 1856 at the age of thirteen. Breckinridge stayed in this position until at her death in 1910. The house was the site of several scientific and technological advancements. Theophilus began to experiment with photography soon after the daguerreotype process was invented in 1839, many of the photographs he took at the house survive today. He often used a telescope for celestial observations from the roof of the house. And in 1876 Theophilus installed the first telephone in state of Indiana, built from plans sent to him from a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, that ran between the house and a college laboratory. Theophilus was an active faculty member at Indiana University until 1886. In that year he became an emeritus professor in which capacity he served until his death in 1895. Rebecca Wylie continued to live in the house until her death in 1913.