Octagon House

Enoch Fuller Octagon // c.1850

Buildings of New England2 Comments

Oh the Octagon! The very rare Octagon house was a unique house style briefly popular in the 1850s in the United States and Canada. The style can generally be traced to the influence of one man, amateur architect and phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler. In his book, The Octagon House: A Home for All of 1848 (and reprinted with more photos in 1853), Fowler advocated for the shape’s benefits for buildings in that the octagon allowed for additional living space, received more natural light, was easier to heat, and remained cooler in the summer. These benefits all derive from the geometry of an octagon: the shape encloses space efficiently, minimizing external surface area and consequently heat loss and gain, building costs etc. Some were convinced and built Octagon houses, but the style and its brief period of popularity, died by the 1860s. This example in Stoneham, Massachusetts was built around 1850 for and by Enoch Fuller, a close personal friend of P. T. Barnum, founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Fuller visited Barnum’s octagonal home in Bridgeport, Connecticut and he decided to construct an octagon house in Stoneham. The home was owned by Col. Gerrry Trowbridge not long after completion. The home was built with a fireplace in every room, a spiral, “flying” staircase, and a sweeping veranda.

Tucker Octagon House // 1856

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The Octagon form of architecture was conceived in 1848 in the prolific mind of Orson Squire Fowler, phrenologist and author of books on sex, family relations, and many other subjects. His book A Home for All, or, the Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building struck the fancy of a certain few, and Octagon homes were built across the country, for just about a decade until they fell out of favor almost overnight. This home in West Gardiner, Maine, was built by Jesse Tucker in 1856 on land his father had cleared, replacing a more standard structure. The new octagon house was being constructed as a gift to Jesse’s soon-to-be wife, but tragically fell from the roof of the barn when building, and died. The home was completed, and it was seemingly acquired by Jesse’s twin brother David. The home remained in the Tucker family until the 1950s.

Lemuel Richmond House // 1856

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Lemuel Clarke Richmond (1782-1876), a whaler, built this Octagon home in his seventies. This was the second home he built in Bristol Rhode Island, the first being the Richmond-Herreshoff House I featured previously. When Lemuel Richmond sold his 1803 Federal style home, his home was empty as his wife passed and all of his children married and moved out of the house. Octagon houses are fairly rare nationwide, and most were built in a small timeframe in the 1850s. The publication of Orson Squire Fowler’s A Home for All: or the Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building in 1853 briefly brought popularity to octagonal structures. The
octagon, according to its proponents, offered greater floor space, increased air and sunlight, and was a healthful natural form. Orson Squire Fowler was a phrenologist (a pseudoscience which involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits) and lecturer who had a huge impact on American architecture, though only for about a decade. The Richmond House in Bristol also features an octagonal cupola, bracketed porch, and a single-room addition over the porch over the front door. Could you live in an Octagon?