Octagon House - History

History

Early examples, before Fowler:

  • Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson's private retreat and plantation house near Lynchburg, Virginia.
  • William Thornton's Tayloe House, more commonly called The Octagon House in Washington, DC. After the White House was burned by the British during the War of 1812, President James Madison stayed in the Octagon House, and it was here that the Treaty of Ghent (ending the War of 1812) was signed. It is now the headquarters of the American Institute of Architects.

Both houses are large brick buildings in the classical tradition. They may be seen as precursors, but are somewhat different from the Victorian octagon houses which are essentially domestic structures.

Read more about this topic:  Octagon House

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
    —Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

    “What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
    —Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

    “Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
    —Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)