The Hanson Farmhouse was built c. 1928 as a "Pioneer Glades" home, and it is the oldest house in Cooper City. It went up beside the concrete water tower from 1922, which survived when the Miami Hurricane of September 1926 destroyed the first house.
Built to stand up to storms and floods
The new house was constructed three feet off the ground on tapered, cone-shaped concrete piers. Lifting the house protected it from flooding on the low land reclaimed from the Everglades. Indeed, the house has never been flooded, not even in the great floods of 1947.
The structural beams and flooring of the 1928 house are the dense Dade County pine, prized for its strength and resistance to rot and termites. The heavy beams are anchored to the piers with steel reinforcing bars.
A simple rectangle under a hip roof
The original ("core") house measured 32 by 24 feet, or 768 square feet. It had a hip roof, which sloped down on all four sides. A small open back porch, not included in those dimensions, ran along the west side.
The core house had four rooms: the main room, two bedrooms, and a sleeping porch on the front (east) side.
The front entrance was on the east side, facing the driveway, not toward Griffin Road, and it opened onto the sleeping porch. The original "St. Augustine pink" concrete steps can still be seen under the house.
The tall double-hung wood windows, 28 by 54 inches each, are still in good condition. Inside the core house, the original two-panel and five-panel doors remain, with two of them handmade on site.
Life without electricity
When built, the house had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. Water was collected and stored in cisterns in the water tower beside the house. Cooking needed an open fire, so it would have been done outdoors, away from the wooden house. Lighting is believed to have come from low-BTU gas lamps fed by pipes in the attic (though no such pipes remain).
The tall ceilings (nearly nine feet high) and windows placed for good cross ventilation kept the house as cool as possible.
Electricity, a kitchen and a bathroom (c. 1938)
Electricity reached the farm around 1938, making two key additions possible. An indoor kitchen was placed on the west side (where the back porch had been), with a door connecting the kitchen to the main room.
Electric pumps also made deeper wells and indoor plumbing practical. So the primary bedroom was extended at the back to meet the water tower, and a bathroom was built inside the tower. There are two steps up from the bedroom into the bathroom, which stands on the tower's concrete floor.
A pumphouse was also added behind the farmhouse for the new electric pump.
The wartime expansion (c. 1943)
Around 1943, the house grew again, and its front entrance was turned to face Griffin Road:
- Screened porches with flat roofs were built along both the north side (facing Griffin Road) and the east side (facing the driveway).
- The new front door faced Griffin Road, with new concrete steps.
- A dining room was added to the front, and the door from the kitchen was moved to enter the dining room instead of the main room.
- A brick fireplace and chimney were also added to the house.
These changes gave the house the look it has from Griffin Road today. Because the porches wrapped around the old house, its original outside walls, siding and windows now face onto the porches. With these various additions, including the water tower and porches, the house now totals about 1,659 square feet under roof.
Later changes and what has been uncovered
In the 1950s and later, the original walls and floors were covered with newer materials, and jalousie windows were added to part of the east porch.
In 2023, preservationist architect Bert Bender assessed the house to be in good condition and well worth restoring. He recommended restoring it to how it looked in its various stages from 1928 through 1943.
Since then, Bill Hanson has stripped away some of those coverings to reveal the original plaster walls and Dade County pine floors.