Hopedale History July 15, 2005 No. 42 Long-gone Octagons This is for those of you living in Hopedale. The possible one or two of you who haven’t already heard this, that is. ABC TV is coming out with a show this fall called My Kind of Town. They looked at fifteen towns in Massachusetts for one episode and have narrowed it down to three: Orange, Barre and Hopedale. The show is supposed to be some kind of comedy/game show combination, done with participants who all live in the same town. They’ll bus 200 people from the town selected to NYC for the show taping. Auditions will be held at the fire station next Wednesday, July 21, between 4:30 and 9 PM. We hear that Orange will be trying to get the attention of the ABC people with some skydiving, so if you have any ideas to top that, call the town hall or email me and I’ll pass it on. <><><><><><><><><><> Long-gone Octagons A big housing fad of the nineteenth century was the octagon house. 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.” Octagons didn’t have a very good survival rate and as we know, none of the three 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. I found the second on the “picture map” that had been originally printed in 1888. (Copies are for sale at the Bancroft Library.) That one was on Dutcher Street, just south of the apartment house across from the fire station. It was evidently razed a short time after the 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. A few weeks ago 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 and it looks at though the octagon was a bit north of where the Griffin-Dennett Apartments are now. The only surviving octagon house I know of in the area is on Fruit Street in Milford. 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 An extensive site listing of octagons, some still existing, others gone, is at http://www.octagon.bobanna.com/main_page.html More on the Hopedale octagons Hopedale History Ezine Menu HOME . |
perform at the annual Friends of Adin Ballou peace picnic at Ballou Park. August 6. |
The octagon house that once stood on Prospect Street. |