Sample-McDougald house (Pompano Beach, Florida)

 place with historical importance  Add category

 Upload a photo

Built in 1916, this house is in process of restoration since it is one of Pompano Beach's oldest homes.

The Sample family arrived in South Florida soon after the turn of the century. John M. Sample, the first to settle in the Pompano area, had purchased farming land from the Florida East Coast Railway prior to 1910. The Sample-McDougald home is a seventeen room Georgian Colonial structure constructed by Sample as a replica of a Greenville, South Carolina home he previously owned. The Sample-McDougald home is built of cypress throughout, features a wide columnar porch that extends in a U-shape around the north side of the house to the rear, and faces busy Dixie Highway. A rambling two-story structure, the house has five bedrooms upstairs, one bedroom downstairs, a reception room, parlor, separate dining room, and kitchen with butler pantry. Its 11-foot ceilings and numerous windows are a good example of pre-air conditioning climate control. The foundation was reinforced with extra brick pillars and because of its superior construction it withstood the devastating hurricanes of 1926 and 1928.

The home served as the base for Sample's farming operations that stretched from Lighthouse Point out west past what is today Powerline Road. Sample funded and constructed a road in 1917 for reaching his cropland. Today that thoroughfare, Sample Road, bears his name.

In the days when Pompano was a farming community and the recently completed Dixie Highway was the only passable highway leading into Miami, the Sample-McDougald home was a stopover for motorists. The home stands as a stately reminder of the promising beginnings for the north-south corridor. The McDougald children inherited the house, and in keeping with their mother's desire, placed it on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

During the late evening hours of May 29, 2001, the house was moved off its original site and over the next seven hours moved south on Dixie Highway and then east on NE 10th Street to its new location at 450 Northeast 10th Street. On September 15, 2004, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

www.samplemcdougaldhouse.com/smh/history.shtml