The octagon house was something of a nineteenth century fad. The peak years for this type of construction were about 1846 to 1865. In 1855, the Woonsocket Patriot sent a reporter to Hopedale to do an article about the Community. One of the things that he noted was that, "Of dwelling-houses there are forty-one, including three concrete octagons."
The picture above at the top left is of a house that was once on Prospect Street. It was probably the longest lasting of the three Hopedale octagons. It was known as "The Castle." The photo at the top right shows an octagon house that appears as though it must have been somewhere between where the post office and the Griffin-Dennett apartments are now. On the bottom is an 1888 "picture map" showing the Prospect Street house and also one on Dutcher Street. That one was just south of the Hopedale House, which, at that time was a boarding house; now it's an apartment house, located across Dutcher Street from the fire station. An addition was put on the boarding house later, which is why the building in the picture looks much smaller than the present building.
Octagons didn't have a very good survival rate and, as we know, none of the three in Hopedale have survived. I knew that one of them had been on Prospect Street, but it took a while to find out where the other two had been located.
The Dutcher Street house was evidently razed a short time after the 1888 map was drawn. It's not on an undated map that was made some time before 1898, and the National Register Nomination gives the date for the house that's on the site now (home of Craig and Joanne Travers) as c. 1890.
In the spring of 2005, Elaine and I were asked to go to Memorial School to help identify locations in some of the old Hopedale pictures they have. There, in one of the pictures, was the third octagon house I had been wondering about for some time. The view shows the General Draper house (now the site of the high school) on the right, the original Unitarian Church, (on the site of the present Unitarian Church, built in 1898) in the middle, and the octagon house on the left. The picture was taken from the south, perhaps from about where the Griffin-Dennett Apartments are now.
The only surviving octagon house I know of in the area is on Fruit Street in Milford. (Fruit Street begins at Route 16, just a few hundred yards east of Milford Hospital. The octagon house is just a short distance up on the right.) I remember one on Maple Avenue in South Grafton, but that disappeared about twenty years ago. Hopedale does have a newer octagon building; the Father Riley Center at Sacred Heart Church.
The big promoter of octagon houses seems to have been Orson Fowler. Here's a bit about him and his houses from a website about an octagon in Michigan.
The octagon mode may be the first pure American housing style, considering that most previous building forms were adopted from European architecture. Thomas Jefferson was one of America's earliest advocates of octagon configurations, designing over 50 buildings with a manifested octagonal feature. An octagon garden schoolhouse enhances George Washington's stately Mount Vernon. Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in an octagonal study patterned after a riverboat pilot's cabin.
But the leading promoter of eight-sided structures was Orson Squire Fowler. Fowler was America's foremost lecturer and writer on phrenology, the pseudo-science of defining an individual's characteristics by the contours of the head. In the middle of the 19th century, Fowler made his mark on American architecture when he touted the advantages of octagonal homes over rectangular and square structures in his widely publicized book, The Octagon House: A Home for All. According to Fowler, an octagon house was cheaper to build, allowed for additional living space, received more natural light, was easier to heat, and remained cooler in the summer. This last attribute was an important point when the ruling principles of Victorian air conditioning were, avoid direct sun and pray for a breeze.
As a result of Orson Fowler's authoritative publication, a few thousand octagonal houses were erected - mostly on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Nationwide, less than 500 of these very rare, romantic, Victorian-era homes are still standing. Even in their heyday, octagon houses never lined city street and neighborhood blocks. On the contrary, an eight-sided home seemed to be the choice of the individualists, standing defiant among four-sided neighbors.
The site the information above comes from is at:
http://www.octagonhouse.org/history.html
Click here for an extensive site listing of octagons, some still existing, others gone. Also, The Old House Web has a page, including pictures, of octagons. Search for octagon houses and you can find many more.
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