The farmhouse was originally built in the 1890s by the Grubb family who left their cotton mill in Ireland to move here. In 1905, the Grubb family sold the property to the Bellhouse family, also ex-cotton mill owners. The Bellhouse family enlarged the house and the surrounding farm and opened "The Farmhouse Inn" to the public in 1925. If the Inn was full, guests were accommodated in tents with wooden floors on the rocky promontory (now named the Bellhouse Park). If there were no tents available, there was always the hay loft in the barn.

Three meals a day were served, cooked by Jessie Bellhouse who recently celebrated her 93th birthday. Her four daughters, Peggy, Mabs, Beth, and Belinda worked as kitchen help and servers. After the meals were served, they polished the dining room floor with one person sitting on a pair of father "Thorney" Bellhouse's old long johns while the others whirled that person around on the floor!

The house burned down in 1927 when the Inn caught fire while everyone was working in the fields. The house was rebuilt immediately with the same design on the original foundations using old-growth timbers. The Inn was reopened in 1928.

Guests came by the Canadian Pacific Railway steam ferry which ran twice a week from downtown Vancouver and were brought from the ferry dock to the Farmhouse Inn in the "Betsy Prig", the Inn's converted fishing boat. Times were slower then and guests would often stay for a week, a month or even the whole summer. If Jessie wanted to serve salmon for dinner she would instruct Thorney to catch a salmon -- "Fifteen pounds will do". He would be back within the hour with the requested fish -- less time if cod was requested.

The Farmhouse Inn closed in the mid-sixties after the daughters had grown up , married, and moved away. The only son, Len, was a very young man. Thorney Bellhouse died in 1964. For the next thirty years the farmhouse was a private residence, owned first by the Day family and in 1980 became the medical center for the island when an Australian doctor and his wife, Dr John and Wendy Hales, bought the property. The present owners, David Birchall and Andrea Porter, bought the property in 1994 and following renovations reopened the Inn in June of 1995, 30 years after the Farmhouse Inn closed for business. They decided to call it the Bellhouse Inn in honour of the Bellhouse family and because there are enough farmhouse Inns around already!

In recent years the Grubb family has once again made contact with the Bellhouse Inn. Ailene Grubb, who was born in the house in 1899, has been to visit several times! Her descendants from England, the Mathews family, after whom Mathews point on Galiano is named, have been regular and welcome visitors also. Many of the people who stays at the Farmhouse Inn have returned to visit or stay at the Bellhouse Inn. Some were here in the 1920s and have wonderful stories to tell. The history is still being added.