When finished, this was the finest private residence in the Federal City, as it antedated the more stately Van Ness mansion by a number of years, and from its unique style of architecture was regarded as the show house of the surrounding country.
The irregular perimeter of its walls—whence the name “Octagon”—includes five sides and six angles for the main body of the house, with two short sides, and a circular swell across the front—demonstrating that the owner had to strain a point and round a curve for its christening. The exterior exhibits many windows of the old-fashioned, small-pane pattern, and from the rear giant old trees fling their flickering shade athwart them.
THE OCTAGON HOUSE
The interior of the house was modeled to fit the outward circumference, the doors, sash and glass in the circular vestibule being made on the circle and all still in working order.
In the niches prepared for them are exhibited two old cast-iron wood stoves, which crackled their good cheer for generations long past, but which evidently owe their present lustre to more recent furbishings. The doors on the ground floor are all of mahogany, and in an excellent state of preservation, as is likewise the railing to the stairway leading from the main hall up to the third story—a frail, insubstantial-looking affair with its slender wooden pilasters and narrow rail; yet, owing to the fact that every fourth pilaster is of iron, and the railing of mahogany, this old stairway has stood the test to which more massive balustrades have succumbed.
The rooms, eleven in all, are few, as compared with the size of the building, but the area of some of them might easily accommodate a modern housekeeping apartment. To the right of the main hall is the spacious drawing room, which has been the scene of many a brilliant assemblage in the days long gone, where the bas-relief figures on the mantel imported from London, watched the going and coming of the men and women who made history. Upon the estimate of an expert, it is said that the cost of reproducing this mantel in marble nowadays would be two thousand dollars.
Opposite the drawing room, to the left of the hall, is the long, high dining room, studded with windows and flooded with western light. Turning back the clock of time for almost a century, one sees gathered around this generous board a distinguished company, including Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams; Hamilton, Marshall, Jay and Pinckney; Webster, Calhoun, Clay and Randolph; Decatur, Porter, Lafayette, Steuben, Sir Edward Thornton and other notabilities.
DRAWING ROOM