The Octagon House

Sometime in the spring of 1848, after a long day of evaluating the bumps and furrows on his patient’s skulls, phrenologist to the stars, Orson Squire Fowler settled down for the evening and put the finishing touches on his book.  It wasn’t a book about how to judge character through an evaluation of the bony orbs of the rich and famous, or about his other burning interests:  sex education; women’s  and children’s rights, temperance, hydropathy, mesmerism or fruits and vegetables.  This was a book about the perfect house.

Ever the reformer, Fowler hit upon a plan that he said would keep people cooler in summer, warmer in winter and healthier all year round.  In, “The Octagon House: A Home For All,” Fowler created designs for a form that would capture the imagination of thousands of Americans during the decade of the 1850s. Then came the civil war and people got distracted.  But before the enthusiasm faded, between 4500 and 5000 octagon houses were built and in spite of the fact that their outside walls were often made of concrete, sometimes a foot thick, only 404 remain standing.   One of those is on Spring Street. 

What an unusual person Fowler was.   

During his early days at Amherst College he and his roommate Henry Ward Beecher became absorbed by their study of phrenology.  Fowler went on to become one of phrenology’s guiding lights, attracting patients or customers or dupes (depending on your level of charity) including President James Garfield, journalist Horace Greeley, abolitionist John Brown, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, poets Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson and fifteen year old Clara Barton, then future founder of the American Red Cross.  Everyone, it seems, was willing to pay a dollar or two to have Fowler examine the contours of their crania for the purpose of discerning character.  Mark Twain tried it a couple of times, once incognito and then months later without disguise, in order to test the truth.  He found it.

So it was that by 1848 Fowler was already famous and when it came to octagon houses, he practiced what he preached.  Fowler built one for himself in Fishkill, New York.  It wasn’t your “ordinary” octagon house either.  It was four stories and 90 feet tall, it had more than 60 rooms, a central spiral staircase capped by a glass enclosed octagonal cupola and a magnificent view of the Hudson River.

Our own, less extravagant, more modest octagon house on Spring Street was built in 1852 – 1853 and according to city records it contains 4,236 square feet on 3 finished levels, with an octagonal cupola on a flat roof.  It stands twenty feet to a side, with ten rooms in all.  To those who grew up with it, it was more than a fascination.

Victoria Beylouni remembers it well.  Victoria’s grandparents owned the octagon house when she was young and she spent many a weekend there.  “They were wonderful, beautiful years, in an extraordinary house.  I remember it vividly.  I remember the decorative touches around the light fixtures, I remember the windows, I remember the staircase.  There was a door and beyond it the most incredible circular mahogany staircase.  We ran up and down those stairs until my grandparents would stop us.  And for the same reason we loved the porch that went around in a circle.  But what was most amazing about the house was how bright it was.  Every room had a window, almost from ceiling to waist height, so there was plenty of light. Even in the dead of winter, it was bright and beautiful.  It always had a warm feeling.” 

Fowler wrote prolifically and successfully on a range of subjects but in the end it was his frank, if not titillating, “Creative and Sexual Science.” that did him in.  His reputation was shattered in the early 1870s by reaction to this, his magnum opus.  It was intended to deal globally with all subjects on which sex had influence.  Since sex influences everything, it made for a very large volume.  Still available now, mercifully in e-book form, this work in 695 curious chapters covers such topics as, “Why men admire the female bust,” and “Specific love-making rules and directions.”  Too generous by half, I suppose. 

While the house on Spring Street and others like it may seem like his lasting legacy, the emergence of electronic reading may yet cause him to rise from the ashes, if only for the benefit of the curious.  And if there’s anything that Fowler’s story evokes, it’s curiosity.   

An astonishing number of Fowler’s writings are still available and there is quite a bit about him available on-line, but check out fascinating chapter 12 of “Saints, Sinners and Reformers” by John H. Martin.  Meanwhile, the next time you find yourself on Spring Street, check out number 21, it has roughly twice as many sides as you would expect.