FAMOUS THRESHOLDS IN WASHINGTON
THE OCTAGON HOUSE
By Annie Riley Hale
At the northwest corner of New York Avenue and Eighteenth Street, within a stone’s throw of the War, State and Navy Department, and almost within the shadow of the Corcoran Art Gallery, is a queer old red brick structure, with stone steps leading up to the white-pillared portico, which is known in Washington as the “Octagon House.”
As a historic mansion, as a “haunted dwelling,” and as a unique piece of Colonial architecture, the Octagon has a triple claim to a place in the catalogue of “famous thresholds.”
Back in 1798—that same year in which George Washington laid the cornerstone of his “two buildings” on North Capitol Street—another Virginian, Colonel John Tayloe, moved by the persuasive arguments of our first President and first real estate boomer for the Federal City, decided to build his “town residence” in Washington, instead of Philadelphia, as was his original intention.
Colonel Tayloe’s Virginia estate, “Mt. Airy,” comprised eight thousand fertile acres along the Rappahannock, with five hundred slaves and a superb villa, all inherited from his father, a member of the House of Burgesses, who built the Mt. Airy country seat in 1758, on a scale of magnificence unsurpassed at that period in this country.
The site of the Octagon was purchased from Mr. Benjamin Stoddert, our first Secretary of the Navy, an office created by the first Adams.
It is related that General Washington was much interested in the Octagon, frequently riding by on horseback to watch the progress of its building, though he was not permitted to witness its completion. Singularly enough, it was begun in the same year, finished in the same year (1801) and designed by the same architect (Dr. Thornton) as his own house on Capitol Hill. The Octagon was well and strongly built and set in a triangular lot which conformed to the street lines. The rear premises, in which were located the stables and servants’ quarters, were enclosed by a high brick wall, now broken in places, and ivy-grown.