FAMOUS THRESHOLDS IN WASHINGTON

FAMOUS THRESHOLDS IN WASHINGTONTHE OCTAGON HOUSEBy Annie Riley Hale

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.

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 architecturewas 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

Although it is not recorded that any of the Tayloes shone very conspicuously in their country’s annals by reason of any great service rendered in positions of public trust, yet because of their great wealth and social prominence, their lives touched at various points many of the great names which emblazon the pages of history. At the time he took possession of his Octagon home, in 1801, Colonel Tayloe’s income was seventy-five thousand dollars a year—three times as much as the President’s salary at that period—and the unbounded hospitality dispensed from his two households at Mt. Airy and the Octagon, embodied the most splendid features of the regal Old South.

He was married at the early age of twenty-one, to Miss Ann Ogle, daughter of Governor Benjamin Ogle, of Maryland. Descended from the Corbins, Gwynnes, Platers and Fauntleroys, connected by the marriage of his sisters with the Lees, Pages, Washingtons, Carters, Beverleys and Lomaxes of Virginia, and by his own marriage with the Bladens, Taskers, and Ogles, of Maryland, Colonel Tayloe’s social prestige was limitless.

One does not live long in Washington ere he learns to uncover and speak softly before a lineage which reaches to the “Eastern shore,” either of Virginia or of Maryland; and when a line is discovered which connects both these aristocratic strongholds—well, words are but poor things, and a solemn hush is the most approving corollary.

ECLIPSE

Colonel Tayloe was educated at Eton and Cambridge, England. He was noted for the urbanity of his manners, for the splendor of his equipages and for his lavish hospitality. In 1802, conjointly with Governor Ridgeley, of Maryland, Colonel Tayloe laid out the Washington City Race Course on the Holmead Farm, about two miles north of the President’s house, near the present Mount Pleasant. For a number of years, the Colonel was at the head of the turf in his native state at a time when the turf was much affected by the aristocratic sportsmen of the old régime. He kept in his stables at Mt. Airy a large number of blood horses. He owned the celebrated Leviathan, Gallatin, Sir Charles, Sir Archy and others; and from his imported thoroughbreds were descended the most famous coursers in the early annals of the American turf. From the Tayloe stables came Eclipse and Henry—“the North and the South”—who ran the celebrated sectional race on the Long Island course in 1823, in which Henry was beaten, and the success of Eclipse was attributed to the manipulation of a jockey named Purdy. The victory was received with uproarious shouts, Eclipse was led to the stand amid the strains of “The Conquering Hero,” and there followed a jubilee in New York. Whereupon, John Randolph, of Roanoke, who was present, remarked: “I am glad no one on the course thought of nominating Purdy for the Presidency, for it would have been carried by acclamation!”

In 1818 Colonel Tayloe built the old Willard Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street, which was enlarged and improved by his son, Mr. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, in 1844, when it became and has since continued the most fashionable hotel of the Federal City.

Colonel Tayloe was in his day the largest contributor to St. John’s Episcopal church, which was the first buildingerected on Lafayette Square after the War of 1812, and is popularly known as “the President’s church,” from the fact that more Presidents have attended it than any other in the city, probably because of its proximity to the White House. Colonel Tayloe presented to this church the massive silver service which formerly belonged to the old church of Lunenburg, in Richmond County, Virginia.

CIRCULAR ROOM IN WHICH TREATY OF GHENT WAS SIGNED

Colonel Tayloe’s occupancy of the Octagon embraced the administrations of four Presidents—Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams—and ceased in 1828, just as the picturesque figure of “Old Hickory” rose above the Presidential horizon. In 1814, after the burning of the White House by the British, the hospitality of the Octagon was tendered to the homeless President and his bewitching “Dolly,” and for six or eight months it was transformed into “the President’s house,” Colonel and Mrs. Tayloe retiring to their country seat for the nonce. In the circular room over the round vestibule, Madison signed the Treaty of Ghent, February, 1815, which closed our second war with Great Britain. The table at which the treaty was signed is still in the possession of the Tayloe family.

The fact that Madison is esteemed one of our most intellectual and scholarly Presidents, that his state papers exhibit not only statecraft, but literary construction of a high order, and that a distinguished Southern Senator in a recent speech in Congress named him “more than any other man the author of the American Constitution,” gives peculiar piquancy to the following story, which is vouched for by Mr. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe:

When a member of Congress in Philadelphia, Mr. Madison boarded in the house of Mrs. Payne, the mother of “Dolly,” at that time the beautiful Widow Todd. Mr. Madison, attractedby the personal charms of the fascinating young widow, sent her a book to read and requested her opinion of it—presumably with a view to sounding her mental depth. Whereupon, Mrs. Todd, who, Mr. Tayloe says, was always more remarkable for beauty, tact and manner than for depth of intellect, asked Colonel Burr, who boarded there, also, to write her reply to Mr. Madison, which he accordingly did.

Shortly afterward, Madison offered himself to the handsome and intellectual widow, and was accepted. This story tallies with the statement from other sources that Burr made the match between Madison and the sprightly Dolly, but if our accomplished fourth President really was ensnared by the schoolgirl ruse, he certainly had no occasion to complain of his matrimonial bargain. For in the judgment of her contemporaries and of all succeeding generations, no lady has ever done the honors of the White House more gracefully and acceptably to all parties than the gracious and lovely Dolly Madison. Her brilliant levees and various functions at the Octagon during her brief sojourn there are among the richest traditions of early official life in the Federal city.

Dr. William Thornton, the architect of the Octagon, was remarkable for his talents, benevolence and eccentricities. He was the first architect of the Capitol at Washington, and was appointed one of the three original commissioners to lay off the city. At the request of Jefferson, he furnished designs for the University of Virginia. He was born in the West Indies, of Quaker parentage, and educated in England and Scotland. A man of science, he was head of the Patent Office from the time of Washington’s administration to that of Monroe, and claimed to have preceded Fulton in the application of steam as a propeller of boats, and to have made experiments on the Delaware before Fulton made his on the Hudson.

This claim naturally brought the two into collision, and their quarrel consisted in writing pamphlets against each other, apropos of which, Thornton is said to have declared: “I killed Fulton with that last pamphlet of mine!” Dr. Thornton married the daughter of an English lady who kept a fashionable school for young ladies in Philadelphia, and is reputed to have stood much in awe of both his wife and mother-in-law—a condition of mind which finds scant compensation in worldly honors. The ladies were allies in their opposition to his leaning toward the turf, to which, despite his Quaker blood, the Doctor was passionately addicted. This brought him into close association with Colonel Tayloe, and their deaths occurred in the same year, 1828.

After her husband’s death, Mrs. Tayloe retired from society, although she continued to make the Washington house her principal home until her death, nearly thirty years later. One of her granddaughters, yet living in the District, is authority for the fact that for more than fifty years the Octagon was lighted solely by candles. Although gas was introduced prior to Mrs. Tayloe’s death, she would never permit its use in the Octagon, looking upon it as a “dangerous innovation,” and clinging to her candles to the last. The granddaughter remembers as one of the distinct impressions of her childhood, the sockets over the doorways which held these wax illuminators.

The Tayloe occupancy of the Octagon ceased with Mrs. John Tayloe’s death, in 1855, though its ownership did not pass from the family until its purchase by the American Institute of Architects, in 1903.

Between the dates 1855 and 1865, the Catholic Sisters of St. Matthew’s Parish taught a girls’ school in the Octagon, and from 1866 to 1879 it was leased by the government for the “Hydrographic Office,” incorporated by Congress in 1866 as a branch of the Navy Department.

Then for nearly twenty years the Octagon was given over to silence, cobwebs, mice and ghosts, the lastthe inevitable tenants of all deserted dwellings which have been the scene of departed grandeur.

A Virginian of good birth—whose fortunes had fallen on evil days, and who was wont to seek solace in the flowing bowl and nepenthic drug—having been installed as custodian of the place, greatly assisted popular superstition by the recital of his own pipe-dream imaginations. As one of the present Tayloes remarked—“you had only to fee the caretaker, and get a ghost-story spun to your liking.”

HALL AND STAIRWAY, SCENE OF THE REPUTED SUICIDE

Indeed, what with a mythical Miss Tayloe flinging herself over the third story balustrade to escape the pangs of misplaced affection, and a British officer—“nameless here forevermore”—walling up an octoroon slave girl in the wine cellar; with bells ringing at all hours of the night through the empty rooms, and heart-rending sighs breathing from hidden nooks and passages, the Octagon is particularly rich in spooky traditions, which neither the incredulous smile of daylight, nor the disapproving frown of the family can wholly dispel. So often have they been repeated, and so closely interwoven with the history of the old house—whole works of fiction having been built on them—that when one goes from the warm sunlight across this colonial threshold, pushing back the heavy curved door with its iron bar and ponderous key, the sensation in one’s spinal region is distinctly creepy. The eye wanders apprehensively up the thin, winding stairway to the third floor and back to the spot in the hall directly beneath, where the fatal plunge was made; and descending the narrow, worn stairs to the basement, one involuntarily listens in expectant dread for the smothered groan or sigh from behind those mouldy bricks.

Mr. Glenn Brown, the accommodating secretary of the American Institute of Architects, which now owns and occupies the Octagon, tells of a more objectionable class of tenantry than the ghosts, when the architects first took charge of the building in 1899. The faithless caretaker had rented out the rooms to irresponsible negroes, and the architects found several families of them domiciled in the erstwhile abode of Presidents. To remove the squalor and damage consequent upon such occupancy, and to restore and preserve the colonial architecture of the once splendid mansion, the Institute expended three thousand dollars, resulting in handsome and artistic headquarters, in all respects worthy of such an organization.

It may not be generally known that prior to 1850, the profession of architecture was not in good repute in America; that carpenters and contractors were much more highly esteemed than architects, the former, in contrast to the latter, being classified as “practical persons.”

In 1857, in the city of New York, a dozen young architects met in the office of Richard Upjohn, for the purposeof considering the organization of a society of architects, whose object should be the promotion of schools for architecture, the publication of journals and raising the standard of public taste in regard to it. This was the genesis of the American Institute of Architects, which now numbers eight hundred members and ten past presidents, of whom Richard Upjohn was the first; another, Thomas U. Walter, designed the present wings of the Capitol, and another, Richard M. Hunt, designed the Administration Building, at the World’s Fair, and the famous “Biltmore,” at Asheville, North Carolina.

The circular room on the second floor of the Octagon, once President Madison’s executive office, is now the business office of the Institute, and Dolly Madison’s bedroom has been converted into an exhibit room for the American Academy in Rome.

Through the courtesy of the secretary, the writer was permitted to explore the back yard and peep into the stable lot, in which is located a large stone block—“whereby hangs a tale.”

A granddaughter of Colonel Tayloe’s, who spent much of her youth at the Octagon, affirms that this stone was used by the postilions in mounting. Yet to the frenzied fancy of more than one chronicler of local history, this was the “slave block,” from which were auctioned some of those five hundred slaves ascribed to John Tayloe, and is referred to in pompous and melodramatic phrase as “doing satanic duty through the years.” Opposed to this is the well authenticated fact that Colonel Tayloe never sold any of his dusky retinue, and his wife’s reply when questioned as to the number of her husband’s slaves: “He has five hundredservants, but only one slave. Iam slave to them all,” is fraught with much historic truth which is pretty generally overlooked in the portrayal of ante-bellum types of Southern women.

Other pious visitors to the Octagon kitchen, looking through the same lens as the discoverers of the “slave block,” beheld in the long iron “spits,” used for roasting meats, uniqueinstruments of torturefor the hapless slaves!

These stories indicate that other imaginations besides the inventors of ghostly legends, have been busy with the long-suffering Octagon; these encrustations of false over the true cannot, however, detract from the real interest of the history of this dignified old mansion.

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