Century-old floating Palm Beach house may soon have a home

The seafaring days of a yellow cottage that was the home of a prominent early 20th-century Palm Beach engineer could soon be over, the Sun Sentinel reported.

The house, believed to be built in 1903, has been floating on a barge since the descendants of Orrel Gleanson Stambaugh, sold the land underneath it to the Palm Beach Country Club in 2011.

Stambaugh’s family members didn’t want to see the house, fittingly called the Stambaugh Cottage, razed for a golf course so the country club earmarked the $10,000 demolition cost for relocation instead. A local contractor donated the barge.

And now the family members think they have found a vacant lot for the cottage, the newspaper reported.

Orrel Gleason Stambaugh moved his family from Oklahoma to South Florida in 1910 and moved into the cottage by the next year, according to historians cited by the Sun Sentinel. He is best known for engineering West Palm Beach’s first roads. [Sun Sentinel] — Emily Schmall