The Jeremiah Schellenger House: Cape May’s Octagon House
As you enter Cape May, after you pass Schellenger’s Landing and head into the center of town, you may notice an unusually shaped house to your left on Lafayette Street—the 1860 Jeremiah Schellenger House, more commonly known today as the Octagon House. Having an eight-sided floor plan, it was built during the Victorian period in accordance with a philosophical underpinning that extolled the benefits for those who lived in such an atypical house. Along with its interesting design, the house has other noteworthy associations, such as the development of Schellenger’s Landing.
The design’s popularity coincided with the rise of the American popular press in the mid-19th century and its wave of how-to books, from A Treatise on Domestic Economy by Catharine Esther Beecher, published in 1843, to Andrew Jackson Downing’s The Architecture of Country Houses, published in 1850. Other unusual topics of public interest were endorsed at the time by “offbeat” personalities.
The house type was first promoted for a wide audience in Orson Squire Fowler’s 1848 book, The Octagon House: A Home For All, or A New, Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building. The book’s title alone is the best summation of Fowler’s philosophy. Some of the inherent beneficial qualities of an octagonal plan are quick to identify; natural light and fresh air are accessible from multiple locations, and the use of materials is more efficient. When comparing the perimeter of a square with an octagon of equal measure, an octagonal plan encloses about 20% more floor area.
While the popularity of the form is most widely expressed in houses, there are notable churches, schoolhouses, and barns with the same geometry. Most of the approximately 100 known surviving examples are in eastern Canada and the United States. The Jeremiah Schellenger House, Cape May’s example, was built in the Italianate style with wide overhanging eaves, a bracketed cornice, and articulated porch columns.
Although Fowler was known for his architectural interest, his endeavors embraced a wide range of fields. He was complex and contradictory. At a time when “bad air,” also known as “night air,” was regarded as the source of diseases, Fowler was a proponent of Phrenology. Considered pseudoscientific even in his day, Phrenology involved the prediction of traits and intellect through the study of the human skull’s shape, contours, and bumps. Fowler, his younger brother Lorenzo, and sister-in-law Lydia Folger published, traveled, and lectured extensively on the subject. Today we take substantiated scientific inquiry for granted, but many areas of investigation had no such grounding two centuries ago. Understanding human behavior, determining factors in patterns of societal interaction, and ways to mold a better citizenry lacked a unifying principle or area of study.
As unplausible as it may seem now, Phrenology became an incredibly popular and influential explanation that filled this void in the mid-19th century. At his worst, however, Fowler and others used Phrenology to justify ethnic and race-based stereotypes. Yet, Fowler, a teetotaler and a vegetarian, also espoused progressive ideals. He was a proponent of abolition, universal women’s suffrage, and laws to restrict child labor.
As an element of urban design, the Jeremiah Schellenger House was an important landmark to Schellenger’s Landing, a point of reference that signaled the approach to Cape May, whose center lies more than a mile away. The landing is named after Cornelius Schellenger, who acquired it in 1695 and was an early settler and whaler from New England. In its earliest days, the landing was important for fishing and transportation. Sanborn Maps of the time indicate numerous wharfs, scores of boathouses with a complement of mechanic, carpenter, and paint workshops. The Octagon House pre-dates the harbor, which was the result of dredging completed in 1903. Soon thereafter, the Cape May Yacht Club was built on an adjoining lot (now the location of the Riggins Service Center).
The popularity of octagon houses waned by the end of the century. Although it had the potential for increased efficiency in terms of materials and energy, its disadvantages were also weighty. Pushback took several forms. Furnishing rooms with angled corners was an ever-present challenge. Building trades, especially carpentry, had a tradition that prided itself on building upward and straight with true 90-degree corners. In the end, the public’s expectation of a “house” and the desire to conform to that idea may have been the Octagon House’s biggest detractor.
All is not lost for the Octagon House, however. It is one of the more documented building types and it has nationwide notoriety, with many examples listed on the National Register of Historic Places and open to visitors, Longwood in Natchez, Mississippi being the grandest. You need not travel that far, however. The Jeramiah Schellenger House, Cape May’s own Octagon House, is a contributing resource to the Cape May Historic District and now is available as a vacation rental.
