When Bishop Berkeley, a noted Irish philosopher and educator, arrived in Newport in early 1729, he was en route to Bermuda to establish a college with funds from the English government. As he awaited the promised funds, he purchased a farm in Middletown and built ‘Whitehall’. But the promised funds never arrived and, in 1731, Bishop Berkeley returned to England.

He gave his Whitehall estate to Yale College which rented it to various tenants, including those who used it as a coffee house and a tavern. During the Revolution, Whitehall housed British soldiers and, for the next hundred years, five generations of one family farmed the land, deserting the house in the 1880s when they outgrew it.

The abandoned house and surrounding half acre were purchased in 1897 by three Newport women who, after repairing it extensively, gave it to The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Rhode Island, with the condition that it maintain Whitehall as a memorial to Bishop Berkeley.

The house has undergone several restorations through the years, now exhibits period furnishings, and has an adjoining garden that is maintained by the Newport Garden Club. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and has been open to the public every summer since 1900.

The Rhode Island Society of Colonial Dames established two endowments in 2000 to support the House.