Greenwich Once Had its Own Octagonal Wonder

by Jeffrey Bingham Mead
Greenwich Time: October 2, 1987

Octagon houses, examples of a 19th-century style of American domestic architecture, are mostly found in the eastern United States. They were built in the shape of an octagon, rising from two to four stories in height.

The roof of an octagon home was either flat or very low, and topped with the cupola. Many octagon houses were surrounded by a porch that completely encircled the house, though some have a porch extending just beyond the front door.

One of these architectural wonders was built in Greenwich in 1857, on Milbank Avenue between the Union Cemetery of the Second Congregational Church and East Elm St.

The house was built by Solomon S Gansey, who claimed that the concept of an eight-sided house was entirely his own.

Judge Frederick Hubbard, who wrote Other Days in Greenwich, relates that: "When Mr. Gansey showed the plan to Mr. Jacob T Weed, he suggested that the house be built out of plum so as to create the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Mr. Gansey told Mr. Weed he didn't know what he meant, but that he had a suspicion that Mr. Weed was laughing at him. However, the house went on, with its windows and doors and eight sides 'til it was completed."

History records for us that the popularity of eight-sided house was due to the creative genius of an eccentric phrenologist named Orson Squire Fowler, who popularized his ideas in a book he wrote in the mid-19th century called A Home for All; or, The Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building. Fowler was a practitioner of phrenology, a field that held the idea that a person's mental faculties are indicated by the shape of the skull.

Besides examining people's skulls and promoting octagon houses, Fowler was a prolific writer of books dealing with health, with such titles as Love and Parentage Applied to the Improvement of Offspring, Sexual Science, and Matrimony, or Phrenology and Physiology Applied to the Selection of Congenial Companions for Life. He built an immense octagon mansion in Fishkill, New York.

Orson Fowler's Octagon House in Fishkill, NY. Demolished in 1897. 

In his book, Fowler elaborated on a number of ideas that in his day revolutionized ideas of home building, and in so doing he sparked the imagination of his contemporaries. Fowler advocated such new ideas for work home comfort as hot water furnaces, dumbwaiters and "speaking tubes," and he was an early proponent of the "indoor water closet," or bathroom.

Fowler believed that there were many benefits to house construction based on the octagon shape. "Nature's forms are mostly spherical," he said. "Since, then, the octagon is more beautiful as well as capacious, and more consonant with the predominant or governing form of nature -the spherical – it deserves consideration."

Fowler maintained that an octagon-shaped home enclosed one-fifth more floor space than the conventional square with the same amount of wall space. With the extra angles, and thus more exposure to light and ventilation, he claimed that the expense of having extra angles was redressed for through a reduction in fuel costs. Fowler boasted about the visual appeal of an octagon house by saying, "Beauty and utility are closely united in architecture as they are throughout Nature," adding that "some forms are constitutionally more beautiful than others."

From Other Days in Greenwich, by Judge Hubbard. 

The Greenwich Octagon House was bought in 1859 by Brush Knapp. It is said that the views from the house of the surrounding landscape were truly remarkable, with fields of grain and timothy to the south and west. A native of Greenwich, Knapp was an active and successful businessman in New York City. Judge Hubbard tells us that Knapp would often state that "when the place was new to him he had to take his bearings with some care lest in attempting to go out at the front door he would really emerge from the back door, so confusing was the construction of his peculiar eight-sided house."

In 1884 Brush Knapp sold the Octagon House to Mary Waring Mead. During her residency, she and Mademoiselle Debray Longchaps started a French and English School on September 24 of that year. The course of study included "all the ordinary and higher branches of an English education, with unusual facilities for acquiring a practical knowledge of French."

Though the school did not apparently succeed in the long run, one educational institution did get its start at the Octagon House – the Brunswick School for Boys. The school began on Sept. 22, 1902, in two rented rooms in the octagon house, under the stewardship of Headmaster George Carmichael. Initial enrollment numbered 14 boys from ages 5 to 17, increasing by the end of the year to 21. 

After three years all seemed fine, though certainly a bit crowded, when the octagon house was sold to the Greenwich Hospital Association, which had decided to demolish the landmark and erect a suitable building for its own purposes in its place. This meant that Brunswick would have no quarters, so interested citizens rallied together to find the school a new home, after incorporating the school. After securing property on Maher Avenue, where the campus still exists, the school moved temporarily to the Old Lenox House at the top of Greenwich Avenue, where the Pickwick Arms Hotel once stood, and where Pickwick Plaza offices now stand. In February of 1908, Brunswick School moved into its present location.

During its short life, the Greenwich Octagon House was a center of history and curiosity that now sadly only exists in accounts of those who were privileged to have strolled its halls and admired its appearance. 

This past summer in Stamford, a historic octagon house on Strawberry Hill Avenue, which had been targeted for demolition, caught fire and burned. 

Fortunately, a privately owned octagon house still remains in Banksville, about a half a mile north of the state line and located close to the LeCremmaillere Restaurant. The name of the road where it sits, appropriately, is called Roundhouse Road.

In their day, octagon houses were perhaps the most modern and innovative architectural gems to grace the American landscape, a treasure that symbolizes the dreams of progress, encompassing the best in American eccentricity and Yankee ingenuity.

Jeffrey Bingham Mead, who lives in Greenwich, is a direct descendant of one of the founding families of the town. He is a freelance writer and a member of the Greenwich Historical Society.