stoneham history

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.

Doucette Ten-Footer // c.1850

Buildings of New England3 Comments

Here is a building type many of you may not know of… the Ten-Footer! This 10 x 10-foot square building is a well preserved example of a kind of shop historically used by many shoemakers in the late-18th to mid-19th centuries. In Stoneham during the 19th century there were many such shops scattered throughout the town as the area became a sort of hub for shoemaking. In the age before and just after the Industrial Revolution, many Massachusetts residents had home shops in the yards where family and neighbors could earn extra part-time money by doing piece work on shoes. These cottage industry shoe workers were paid for each pair of shoes delivered to the local distributor. Usually, the owner-shoemaker worked alone or with family members in the cramped space with materials like leathers, rubber, and straps stored in the attic space in a loft in the gable. This ten-footer was built in the mid 19th century and later owned by Peter Doucette, who ran a shoe shop here. The small building was eventually acquired by the Stoneham Historical Society and was moved behind their building, restored and it can better tell the story of the town’s rich shoemaking history.