King-Cromartie House
Fort Lauderdale, Broward County, Florida
Marker Inscription
King-Cromartie House In 1907, Edwin T. King, the town's first builder, a boatwright and an early citrus grower, built his third home on the south bank of the New River near what is no US1. It remained the King family home until 1968. King's daughter Louise and her husband Bloxham Cromartie ( Ivy Cromartie Stranahan's brother) resided there for most of their married life. The Junior League of Fort Lauderdale barged the house upriver to this site in 1971 to save it from demolition. Built of Dade County pine, the house is four-square Georgian style. Originally one-story, a second floor was added in 1911.
Erected by Fort Lauderdale Historical Society
The Story
Built in 1907 by Edwin T. King—Fort Lauderdale's first builder, a boatwright and early citrus grower—this Dade County pine house stood on the New River as the young town took shape. It remained in the King family until 1968, sheltering King's daughter Louise and her husband, a brother of the noted civic figure Ivy Cromartie Stranahan. In 1971 the Junior League floated the house upriver by barge to save it from demolition.
Why it matters
It preserves the domestic world of South Florida's pioneer settlers and stands as an early triumph of grassroots historic preservation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Fort Lauderdale was barely a town at all — a raw settlement taking shape along the New River, where South Florida's frontier of citrus groves, boats, and pine woods was only just being cleared and built. This was the Progressive-era edge of American settlement, a place where a single skilled builder could shape the look of an entire young community.
South Florida then was a landscape of water and heat, reached and worked mostly by boat. The New River was the town's main street and highway at once, and the men who could build a sound house or a seaworthy hull were among the most valuable citizens a frontier town had. Local building meant local materials, and the region's dense, resinous native pine was prized for its strength and its stubborn resistance to rot and insects.
Into this setting a house rose on the river's south bank in 1907, near the route that would later become a great north–south highway. It was built to last in a place that was still deciding what it would become — a private home standing witness as a wilderness outpost grew into a city.
People & events
The house was the work of Edwin T. King, remembered as the town's first builder — a boatwright and early citrus grower who put his trade to work on land as well as water. This was, the marker notes, his third home, and he raised it from Dade County pine, the tough local wood that gave so many early South Florida buildings their durability. Built first as a single story, it gained a second floor in 1911 as the family and the town both grew.
It remained the King family home for more than sixty years, until 1968. King's daughter Louise lived there for most of her married life with her husband, Bloxham Cromartie, and the house took its double name from those two families joined under one roof. Bloxham was the brother of Ivy Cromartie Stranahan, a figure long associated with Fort Lauderdale's early civic life, which threads this modest home into the wider story of the town's founding families.
The house's most dramatic chapter came late. In 1971, facing demolition, it was rescued in remarkable fashion: the Junior League of Fort Lauderdale had it placed on a barge and floated up the New River to its present site. A building first raised beside the water was, decades later, saved by traveling across it.
Its place in the American story
The King-Cromartie House preserves something rare and fragile — the everyday domestic world of America's pioneer settlers at the moment a frontier turns into a town. Grand public buildings often survive; the ordinary homes where founding families actually lived usually do not. This one endured, carrying its Dade County pine, its four-square Georgian lines, and its added upper floor as a physical record of how early South Floridians built and lived.
It also stands for a distinctly American impulse: grassroots historic preservation. The decision, in the early 1970s, to save a threatened house by literally moving it upriver was an act of civic will by volunteers who believed a community's past was worth the trouble of rescuing. That instinct — that ordinary citizens can and should preserve the places that made them — has protected countless landmarks across the country.
In honoring this house, the marker honors both the settlers who raised the young town and the later generation who refused to let its origins be bulldozed. Together they represent the two halves of preservation: building something worth keeping, and then choosing to keep it.
If you visit
Come to see a survivor. This is a house that was built by hand from local pine, lived in by one family for more than sixty years, and then floated up a river to escape the wrecking ball — and it wears all of that history in its plain, sturdy frame. Look at the wood and the simple four-square shape, and you are looking at how South Florida built before air-conditioning and concrete.
Let the setting carry you back. You are near the New River, the waterway that was the young town's lifeline, and the same river that later served as the highway for the house's own rescue. Picture the barge and the slow trip upstream, and the everyday drama of preservation stops being an abstraction.
For a road trip, this marker fits beautifully into a day exploring Fort Lauderdale's historic riverfront, where several of the area's oldest structures cluster along the water. Walk the riverbank, imagine the town when this pine house was one of its newest and finest homes, and you will feel how a modern city grew up around a few stubborn survivors like this one.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Edwin T. King
- · Louise King Cromartie
- · Bloxham Cromartie
- · Ivy Cromartie Stranahan
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