One of the oldest homes in the Middle Keys has a new home of its own. Whether it will stay there or move again remains to be seen.</p><p>Marathon's first permanent school teacher, Sue M. Moore, lived in the small wooden cottage fronting U.S. 1 oceanside in Marathon's Old Town. She educated Middle Keys kids from 1931 until her retirement in 1947.</p><p>Most people know the quaint white house with blue trim as the old Sea Air Land Technologies office. But that business moved up and across the highway last year, and the Moore house has sat vacant ever since.</p><p>Monday, the bulldozers came to make way for a new 10,000-square-foot West Marine outlet to replace the current West Marine. Both sites -- the current West Marine, which is around 6,000 square feet, and the site of the new one -- sit between 20th and 22nd streets, surrounding the Marathon Boat Yard.</p><p>But the earthmovers didn't knock down the Moore house, or her son's house adjacent to it.</p><p>Instead, a crew from Russell Building Movers moved them to the Marathon Boat Yard, owned by Bruce Popham. </p><p>"We had to move fast," Popham says. "So they literally just knocked down the fence [separating the Marathon Boat Yard and future West Marine] and just moved them right in."</p><p>And there they sit, in the boat yard's dry storage lot, behind the boat yard's main office -- itself a historic old cottage.</p><p>Popham says Moore's house is believed to have been built around 1905 or 1910 in Key West, then delivered to Marathon.</p><p>"So it was here when the railroad was here," he says. Popham says her son's house, which is nearly identical to Moore's, was built around the 1940s.</p><p>The original plan was to move the cottages to the sprawling Crane Point Hammock around mile marker 50 bayside, but those plans fell apart.</p><p>So Popham had the choice of either knocking down the homes or figuring out something else. He contacted his friend Brian Schmitt, a prominent Realtor and a member of one of Marathon's pioneering families.</p><p>"I have a property across from the airport, 94th street, Lime Lane, there's nothing there," Schmitt says. "So it's a vacant piece of ground I've got there. I said, Hey, to make sure they don't get knocked down, I have a place to put them. It was basically a fail-safe thing."</p><p>"We just didn't want them to get lost," Schmitt says.</p><p>But Popham is high on Marathon's Old Town area, and really wanted the cottages to stay there.</p><p>"I just didn't want to see them go away," he says.</p><p>So for now, they'll sit where they are now, on lifts in his dry lot, while he figures out what to do with them. One option is putting them out at the point of the boat yard to front Boot Key Harbor, maybe slap some paint on them, do some upgrades.</p><p>"They're nice little places," Popham says.</p><p>This isn't the first time a historic Old Town Marathon home had been considered for relocation to Crane Point but never made it.</p><p>Nearly across from Popham's boat yard is Faro Blanco Marine Resort, now closed but slated for redevelopment. On that property is the Parish home, built in 1939. Over the years, it had been turned into three resort cottage units that butted up directly to the resort pool.</p><p>The Florida Keys Land and Sea Trust, which operates Crane Point, wanted the house to use as a museum. However, resort developer the Spottswood Companies Inc. had decided to keep the building on site and incorporate it into its redevelopment.