Bell Homestead National Historic Site, Historic house and museum in Brantford, Canada

Melville House, the main building of the Bell Homestead, is a two-storey farmhouse with pale yellow walls and a dark green roof. A full-width veranda runs across the front, its flat roof edged by a white railing with green diamond cut-outs and held up by white posts with the same motif. Behind four tall white columns are a dark green door and windows with dark green louvered shutters, and a Union Jack flies from a pole above the left end of the veranda roof.

The Bell family arrived from Scotland in 1870 and bought this 5.25-hectare farm at Tutelo Heights for CA$2,600, moving into the farmhouse later called Melville House. Alexander Graham Bell set up a laboratory in the converted carriage house and worked out the telephone here in July 1874. The farmhouse and land were acquired as a museum in 1909; the site became a National Historic Site on 1 June 1996.

The house is named Melville House after Alexander Melville Bell, the elocution professor whose textbook on visible speech was used to teach the deaf. The site also holds the Henderson Home, moved here in 1969, which opened in 1877 as Canada's first telephone company business office. A tea house and a visitor reception centre with a small audio-video theatre were added for tour groups.

The grounds are reached via a visitor reception centre beside Melville House, which holds a small audio-video theatre for orientation before tours. The Henderson Home, moved here in 1969, now serves as a separate telephone museum. The site lies on Tutela Heights on the outskirts of Brantford, about two miles from the city on the Mount Pleasant road.

The Henderson Home on the grounds was Canada's first telephone company business office, opened in 1877 as a predecessor of the Bell Telephone Company of Canada. It was moved to the Homestead from downtown Brantford in 1969 and renovated in 1970 into a museum of telephone technology.