NORFOLK, Va.

This is the story of a boat that went home without actually going anywhere.

Its adventures include ghost towns, guns, bootleg liquor, terrific storms and tofu.

It’s a moving story.

Without much movement.

In 1927, a wooden railroad barge scavenged from a shipyard became the foundation for a white house, two stories tall, built Southern-style with wraparound porches on both levels. With the addition of a paddle wheel, it would have resembled a Mississippi river queen. Because it was built on a barge, however, the house did float.

This was the houseboat that Will built.

Capt. W.W. “Will” Colonna Sr. was president of Colonna’s Shipyard, a business on the south bank of the Eastern Branch of the Elizabeth River in Norfolk’s Berkley section. The shipyard had been started by his father in 1875.

Capt. Will, short for “Will-oughby,” knew how to mix business with pleasure. Accordingly, each fall, he would invite family, friends and business associates to come aboard for a hunting party, and then the steam tug Carl D. Colonna, named for Capt. Will’s brother, would tow the houseboat to the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina.

The Y-shaped tow line had to be rather long. Too short, and waves created by the tug would slap against the flat bow of the houseboat and make it difficult to tow and prone to wander, said W.W. “Bill” Colonna Jr., son of Capt. Will.

Bristling with guns, towing canoes behind it and flying the American flag, the unnamed houseboat would tie up on Milltail Creek near a now-vanished sawmill town called Buffalo City. Built in the swamp and bisected by a rail line that carried massive tree trunks to the mill, Buffalo City was renowned as a place of rough justice and white lightning.

When the houseboat first visited Milltail Creek, the bootleggers figured it was carrying revenuers come to bust up the stills.

Once reassured that the hunters were after only deer and bear, the locals expressed their gratitude by leaving a gallon jug of whiskey on the deck each morning. No one ever saw who left it, Bill Colonna said, and the whiskey, in its turn, would disappear as well.

When the party was over, the houseboat would be towed back to Hampton Roads and anchored in a little spur of Indian River, itself a spur off the Elizabeth, right at a point.

And that’s where it was in the mid-1930s when the hurricane arrived.

Bill Colonna can’t pin down the exact year, but he was about 6 years old that autumn, in his family’s house on the river’s edge, in the Oaklette community of what is now Chesapeake.

“I happened to look out the window,” he recalled recently, sitting in a glass-walled conference room overlooking the shipyard he now heads. “I hollered to my mother: ‘There goes the houseboat!’”

In the storm surge and blowing rain, the anchor chain had given way, and the winds blew the houseboat across the flooded marsh until it fetched up on higher ground near the house.

When the winds died down and the water level fell, there it sat, stuck fast.

And there it remained.

Capt. Will tried valiantly to set the houseboat free.

With shovel and wheelbarrow he built a little dam between the houseboat and the river, and waited for a freshwater pond to form.

When it did, he moved the houseboat a few feet toward open water, built a new dam between the houseboat and the river, broke down the old dam and waited for another pond to form.

But he grew tired of building dams.

In 1948, with the houseboat trapped in its latest little pond, still a good quarter-mile from the river, the Colonnas cut bait and sold it.

Bill and Ruby Mansfield intended to build their own house on the four acres that came with the houseboat, but they never got around to it.

Instead, they lived on the houseboat for 30 years, right where it was, floating in its little pond at the end of Seneca Avenue.

Bill Colonna always kept an eye on the place, mainly because he lived next door and had, in 1949, opened a fitness center called Colonna’s Gym for Advanced Bodybuilders on the family homestead. It attracted serious bodybuilders from up and down the East Coast. He also had a chain of Health Food Centers; in the 1950s he was named Mr. Norfolk, Mr. Virginia, and the state water skiing champion.

The Mansfields went on about their business, raising two daughters aboard the landlocked houseboat.

The hunting trips to Buffalo City had ended decades before; the town was gone, too, abandoned and absorbed into the swamp, then into a national wildlife refuge.

“About 1,000 people lived there,” Colonna said. “Today, the swamp has reclaimed it. It’s gone. It’s a thing of the past.”

He didn’t want the same thing to happen to the houseboat. In 1978, he bought it back.

Once back in the fold, the houseboat became known as the Houseboat Health Kitchen. It hosted cooking and nutrition classes in conjunction with the chain of Health Food Centers, on the third Wednesday of each month.

On a map given to customers, “X” did, indeed, mark the spot where the houseboat floated, trapped on the wrong side of the marsh.

In 1981, the houseboat was the backdrop for a bake-off featuring recipes such as Vegetable Tofu Casserole and Homemade Jam Without All That Sugar, along with the more usual chili and vanilla pudding.

In 1992, Cajun cooking was added to the menu, and the houseboat became known as the home of the Crawfish Jamboree, a yearly bash the shipyard threw for its customers.

But the boat was in declining health. In the 2000s, the wooden railroad barge began leaking. Colonna no longer trusted it. Reluctantly, he stopped allowing visitors onboard, although he still used it as a personal retreat where he enjoyed playing the piano and singing.

For a while, the houseboat lingered.

Then, one day, Colonna knew what he had to do.

“I sat here, and I walked in the woods and kept looking at that boat and estimating how much it was going to cost,” he said. “I finally decided just to do it.”

The big problem was the hull. It had holes in it, but on top of the barge sat two perfectly good, if slightly worn, floors worth of house.

So Colonna had pilings sunk into the bottom of the little pond that had filled in behind his father’s earthen dam, and on top of those he had a concrete slab poured. Then he engaged the company that in 1999 had moved the Cape Hatteras lighthouse 2,900 feet inland from the brink of the ocean, and asked it to move the top of the houseboat a few feet to the left.

That’s the last move it will ever make.

Once the house part of the boat was successfully moved onto its new foundation, Colonna had the base clad and painted to look exactly like the barge once did. It stands higher now than it did in its floating days, because hurricanes still blow water up the marsh and he doesn’t want the first floor to flood.

The inside is also undergoing a full renovation. New roof, new windows, new insulation, new floors. When a piece of paneling was taken down, Colonna discovered a pencil-written message inside the wall from his father: “Put on April 11, 1941 by Mr. W.W. Colonna.”

Going upstairs, Bill Colonna said, “Here’s something kind of unique.” Inside the kitchen pantry he pointed out, written on the wall in black ink, Mrs. Mansfield’s inventory: “1 — tuna, 1 — Crisco, 18 — peas, 5 — beets,” and so on.

“I’ve got to paint around it,” he said.

The houseboat has bedrooms and a bathroom and a kitchen and a gathering space for family and friends and the old piano. It has insulated windows and lovely hanging baskets of flowers on the wraparound porches.

The renovation is almost done.

“It was a clear choice,” Colonna said. “It’s become part of the family and the community.”

In the serene pond, turtles come up to be fed. Also in the water, during the renovation work, someone found the winch that used to be on the houseboat. It will be repainted and re-installed.

Colonna would love to have the old anchor, but it sank into the mud of Indian River a while ago, he said, and the flukes are no longer visible. Maybe, someday.

“In today’s world, we have busy lives,” Colonna said. “We can’t dwell on the past, but sometimes, I think, it’s good for the soul to have reminders.”

Like this one, the house(boat) that Bill built.