The oldest house in Cooper City.

First there was water.

The ground under the farmhouse was once sawgrass marsh, part of the Everglades. Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward promised to drain it, and by 1906 dredges were cutting west from the New River. The South New River Canal, which still runs along Griffin Road, was finished in 1912.

The drained land left a deep layer of black muck, and farmers followed. In 1914 the state sold this 20-acre tract for $35 an acre.

Broward's drainage made this a place where people could farm. The house is what they built in order to do it.

Ralph Horton builds a two-story house.

Horton was a builder and a loud promoter of Everglades farming, and he put up a two-story house with an 18-foot concrete water tower beside it. The tower had two cisterns. One caught rain from the roof. The other held well water lifted by a windmill.

Water towers like this were common in the county then. This one may be the last of its kind left in the area.

The hurricane took the house. The tower stayed.

The Miami Hurricane of 1926 destroyed the buildings across western Broward. On this farm only the tower and the concrete piers of the house survived.

Around 1928 a new house went up on those same piers, raised higher, built for the next storm. The house was small and plain, a 768-square-foot rectangle with no electricity and no indoor plumbing. Cooking happened outdoors, so a kitchen fire could not take the house with it.

Then the lights came on.

Electricity reached this part of the county in the late 1930s, about twenty years after downtown Fort Lauderdale. It changed the house. An indoor kitchen went in, and electric lights replaced gas lamps. Electric pumps made deeper wells practical, and that made indoor plumbing possible.

The bathroom went inside the water tower. The master bedroom was extended to meet it. In 1943 a dining room and a wrap-around porch were added, and the house took the shape people see from the road today.

The bathroom is in the water tower. It was a clever fix, and it is why the tower is still here.

Two storms in one autumn.

John Hanson had just left the Navy, where he flew and trained pilots. He and his wife Arline, both from Cleveland, saw the farm in the spring of 1947 and bought it.

On September 17 the eye of a hurricane passed directly over the property. Less than a month later, 15 inches of rain fell on land that was still flooded. The orange grove was destroyed. John laid boards across oil drums to get a walkway to the front door over three feet of water.

The house was unharmed. In its whole history it has never flooded.

Forty years of trees.

John worked for Florida Power and Light until 1974. Then he and Arline started a landscape tree nursery on the farm. Under the topsoil sat a layer of ancient coral limestone, so every tree needed a three-foot hole augered out and refilled. At its peak the nursery held about 2,000 trees, sold across South Florida and as far away as Canada.

After John died in 2016, Arline kept going out to the farm every day. She was still driving her golf cart around it two weeks before she died, at 101.

The land changes hands. The house stays.

The family sold the land to a residential developer and kept about four-tenths of an acre for the farmhouse.

They commissioned two studies, a historical survey and a historic structure report. Both found a house that was sound and significant. In 2023, the Florida Department of State agreed that the house is potentially eligible for the National Register of Historic Places (for Exploration/Settlement and Agriculture).

Nevertheless, in August 2024 Cooper City ordered it moved or demolished by September 2026. Three offers to move it fell through, and none would have taken the water tower.

Preservationists say a historic building belongs where it stands, and this house shows why. Moved, it would lose the road, the canal and the ground that give it meaning.

The Board recommends protection.

In June 2026 the Broward County Historic Preservation Board began its own review of the farmhouse. On September 17, 2026 the Board made a formal recommendation to the Broward County Commission: designate the farmhouse historic and impose a condition requiring its preservation. The Commission is scheduled to take up the recommendation on December 8, 2026.

The goal is to keep the house where it stands, restore it, and put it back to use.