The Steamboat House was built in 1858 by Rufus W. Bailey on a rural tract northeast of Huntsville as a private residence, its unusual steamboat-like form, with twin front turrets and wraparound galleries resembling a riverboat's decks, making it a domestic curiosity rather than a public or civic building. In late 1862, Sam Houston, then removed from the governorship for refusing to swear allegiance to the Confederacy, rented the house and moved his family there from their farm in Chambers County; it served as an ordinary family home until Houston's death in the front room in July 1863. After his death the house passed through a series of private owners and tenants and, by the 1930s, had deteriorated into a rundown multi-family dwelling known locally as Squatters' Place, still functioning purely as informal residential housing. In 1936 the house was purchased, dismantled, and relocated to the grounds later occupied by the Sam Houston Memorial Museum, where it was restored and formally presented to the State of Texas. Since its move and restoration, the Steamboat House has functioned as a historic house museum rather than a residence, furnished to evoke Houston's final months and open to the public as one of the signature structures on the museum's fifteen-acre campus in Huntsville. It draws roughly 40,000 visitors a year who tour the interior, including the room where Houston died, making its present-day use interpretive and educational rather than domestic.