Eight More Octagons

After the portfolio of octagonal houses appeared in our August/September issue, many readers called our attention to their favorite octagons:

Your subject matter continues to hit on things of interest to me, particularly Mr. Boulton’s story “Age of the Octagon.” We have a prime octagon here in Marshall (below) , dating from 1856. Orson Fowler, who wrote the book that inspired the craze for eight-sided buildings, spent a week lecturing here in 1850 and must have been selling the concept even then. In a telephone conversation, Carl F. Schmidt, the author of The Octagon Fad , the first authoritative book on the subject, told me that our county—Calhoun—had more octagons than any other except Fowler’s home county of Dutchess.