Russell Kirk and the Octagonal House

Once again, I stray from my blog's title, and blather about that peninsular state immediately north of mine. Ohio is not the country's only — nor, arguably, its most — architecture-rich state. Much as early Christianity syncretized classical culture, I'll pluck post-worthy material from even heterodox sources. This is not a political blog; I don't intend, by quoting Kirk, to promote his philosophy (nor do I, by writing this disclaimer, seek to slight it).

In A Program for Conservatives (1954), political philosopher Russell Kirk eulogizes an octagon-shaped farmhouse:

When I was a very small boy, I used to lie under an oak on the hillside above the mill-pond, in the town where I was born, and look beyond the great willows in the hollow to a curious and handsome house that stood on the opposite slope, away back from the road, with three or four graceful pines pointing the way to it. This was an octagonal house, its roof crowned with a glass dome — a dignified building, for all its oddity. Well, the county planners have chopped down the willows and converted the land round about the old mill-pond into what the professional traffic-engineers and town-planners think a 'recreational area' should look like: a dull sheet of water with some dwarf evergreens to set it off. And the octagon-house was bought by a man with more money than he knew how to spend, who knocked the house down . . . and built upon its site a silly 'ranch-type' dwelling vaguely imitated from Californian styles. As Thoreau used to buy all the farms round Walden Pond in his fancy, so I had made myself, often enough, proprietor of the octagon-house in my mind's eye. But I do not care to look upon the spot now. The old genius is departed out of the town and the country about it. We do our best to assimilate every community that retains something of its peculiar character to the proletarian cosmopolis of modern mass-society.

Kirk, forever a Michigander, spent his childhood in Plymouth, taught at Michigan State University, and retired to Mecosta, an isolated village in the north-central portion of the state. The octagonal house in question, apparently, stood on Wilcox Road in Plymouth Township, Wayne County — due west of Detroit proper. The ever-useful Octagon House Inventory provides a photograph of the dwelling (for copyright's sake, I'll avoid posting the image here), and mentions a demolition date of "about 1955." Given Kirk's comments, this date seems reliable enough (though a tad late).

The building in 1951. Photo from the USGS collection, downloaded from EarthExplorer.

Just as Kirk describes, the home was topped by a glass dome — a feature uncommon even to octagon-shaped dwellings — and four conifers indeed lined its driveway. The 1876 Illustrated Historical Atlas of the County of Wayne, Michigan lists J.H. Phillips as holder of the 53-acre tract; by 1883, ownership had passed to one H. Heide. Phillips, like most of southern Michigan's early residents, hailed from New York. The octagonal house's replacement — the "ranch" dwelling Kirk decries — survived for a mere four decades before succumbing, like its predecessor, to the bulldozer. Today, a condominium complex occupies the site.

Phillips's eight-sided abode weathered nearly a century; its successor existed for less than half. Will the condominiums persist for only twenty years? I don't know. Only time can tell.