Octagon House

Marion's Octagon House is an eight-sided Victorian house dating from the 1850s, part of a brief national craze for unconventional architecture that produced a handful of octagonal homes across the United States. The Marion example has been preserved and is now managed by the Marion County Historical Society, which occupies the adjacent buildings.

The exterior is distinctive — you notice the odd geometry from a block away — and the interior room arrangements that result from an eight-sided plan make for an interesting visit. The Historical Society uses the complex to display local history artefacts, including extensive material on Marion's role as a railway junction and its place in Ohio's industrial history. Worth a stop if you have time after the Harding sites.

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A story
The octagonal house craze of the 1850s was inspired by Orson Squire Fowler, a phrenologist (a now-discredited science that judged character from skull bumps) who published "A Home for All, or The Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building" in 1848. Fowler argued that an eight-sided house was more efficient, cheaper to heat, and received more natural light than a conventional rectangle. About a thousand were built across North America; perhaps half survive. The Marion example is one of Ohio's best-preserved specimens of this short-lived architectural enthusiasm.