The Octagon Hotel

by Clarke Davis

Valley Falls had an octagon-shaped hotel called The Octagon in the 19th century.

It was built by a frontier doctor who came here long before the railroad and only four years after Kansas Territory was opened to white settlers.

Librarian Kay Lassiter has now discovered in her reading why he built an eight-sided structure. It was simply the “in thing” at that time.

In Paul Collins’ “The Trouble with Tom,” a book about Thomas Paine, she discovered Orson Fowler, a phrenologist and social reformer who lectured and published a lot from 1834 to 1889.

Besides convincing people to be vegetarians, he also thought they should live in eight-sided houses, which he promoted as a “Home for All: Or a New, Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building.”

Collins writes, “Scattered across the United States to this day are a motley collection of half-baked gingerbread Victorians built by Fowler’s disciples. They go by local nicknames like the Bandbox, the Inkwell, or — less imaginatively — the Octagon House.”

Fowler looked to nature for the perfect shape and found mostly spherical things like an egg. But building a house and bending the wall like a barrel, he thought, would be too difficult. But local carpenters were skilled enough to build an octagon.

Fowler also looked back to Thomas Jefferson who built an octagonal house for his daughter with a pair of octagonal outhouses.

They allowed more windows, thus were lighter and healthier and good health was necessary for the moral improvement of the world.

The octagon was a hit. Henry Ward Beecher built one, P.T. Barnum built one. Clarence Darrow spent his childhood in one. The group that Fowler appealed to mostly was doctors and ministers.

The movement spawned the Vegetarian Settlement Company that had the intent to build an Octagon City in Kansas. Prospective settlers committed $50 to $10,000 into the enterprise, but utopia would escape them. The expected fairyland turned into death and dispair.

Dr. Lorenzo Northrup began building an Octagon House in Valley Falls in 1858. It was located in Block 21 where the Ryan Shaw Body Shop and Old Elevator saloon are now in operation.

The foundation and corners were stone and the walls a mixture of concrete and stone. The rooms were finished with black walnut. The house was built for a residence, but became a hotel with Dr. Northrup as the proprietor.

Northrup designed the house himself. Each side of the octagon was 16 feet. It was two stories high with a basement, eight gables, a cupalo, and observatory. There were 20 rooms in the house.

One source put the cost at $20,000 but it took several years to build and the doctor wasn’t sure how much he did have invested in the home. It was completed in 1865 and became a hotel in 1872.

The doctor owned the bottom farm east of his house and here he started a brickyard, made brick and got together many cords of wood. The floods of 1858 sent the whole business down the river.

The Octagon House was destroyed by fire March 5, 1905.

Dr. Lorenzo Northrup, one of the pioneer physicians in Kansas and one who figured prominently with the early history of Jefferson County, was a native of New York. He was born May 10, 1819.

According to history recorded by the Valley Falls Historical Society, his maternal grandfather was a musician in the Revolutionary War. Lorenzo was educated at the Homer Academy in New York. In 1840, he entered on the study of medicine, attended the Willoughby Medical School, and in 1843 commenced to practice.

His first practice was in Ravenna, Ohio. At this time the treatment of strabismus, or cross eyes, was in its infancy. Northrup was among the first to introduce it into practice, and became very successful. He attained a wide reputation for proficiency as an anatomist, and skill as a surgeon. He removed from Ravenna to Limaville, Ohio, continuing his practice there for a time, thence to Newcastle, Pa., and after a temporary sojourn, returned to Limaville, residing there until 1853, when he came to Kansas.

He located in what was then Grasshopper Falls, where he successfully practiced medicine and surgery. In 1857, he built a schoolhouse here, and employed a teacher at his own expense, so deeply was he interested in the education of not only his own family, but the children of his neighbors. This was the first school in the town, and was conceded to be the first in the county.

He was a member of the school board for four consecutive terms, and largely through his exertions and contributions the first stone schoolhouse was built.

Politically, the doctor was a Whig and a strong Anti-slavery man. When he came to Kansas he identified himself with the Free-state party and acted with the Republican party, since its organization.

He married Jane Gray Brooke, of Ellsworth, Mahoning County, Ohio, in 1844. She was the daughter of James Brooke. Her grandfather Brooke was a citizen of Maryland and was the first man in the state to manumit his slaves, being compelled under the then existing laws of the state to become responsible for their conduct.

Dr. Northrup and wife had five children, Hester M. B., Elmer B., Kirtland B., Daniel B., and Kate.