Nathan Cobb Cottage is a rare historic home built in 1897 by William Fagen in the frame vernacular style using local traditions and cultural practices, and it is one of the last standing structures in Florida erected from salvaged ship lumber and wood freight. Its walls were made from railroad ties taken from the wreck of the schooner Nathan F. Cobb, which capsized during a nor'easter off the coast of North Carolina, drowning two crewmen, then drifted 375 miles before running aground off the coast of Ormond, now Ormond Beach, on December 5, 1896. During an attempt to rescue the surviving six crewmen, Freeman Waterhouse, a bookkeeper for the Ormond Hotel, drowned and his body was never recovered. The cottage originally included a dog-trot, a detached kitchen structure, a wood plank front porch with ship balustrade railing, exposed railroad ties on its exterior walls, and a wood shake shingle roof with two dormer windows, and it was later modernized by the addition of an indoor kitchen, bathroom, and electricity. Such a building is unlikely to be constructed again because wood schooners have not been built since the 1920s and almost all were decommissioned and salvaged decades ago.