Yale-Cady Octagon House - Octagon Buildings on Waymarking.com

The Yale-Cady Octagon House is located at 7550 Main Street (NYS Route 28) on the northeast corner of the intersection with North Street on the north side of the hamlet of Newport, Herkimer Count, NY. The house was completed in 1850. the exterior walls of the Yale-Cady Octagon House were built of locally quarried, gray and tan hued Trenton limestone bedded in lime mortar in a random ashlar pattern. The boldly projecting wood cornice is embellished with three pairs of wood brackets defining each of the building's eight facets. In the center of a low-pitched roof is an octagonal cupola of wood with a single window on each of the eight sides. The main entrance consists of a two-story recessed porch with two freestanding 18" by 20" stone piers with a run of cast iron railing defining the second-floor porch. The primary door is highlighted by a frontispiece consisting of pilasters flanking the opening with a pediment-like peaked crown terminated by corner blocks above classically inspired plaster faces in high relief. The double primary door and the second-story porch door both have ornate cast-iron grilles. There are two first floor projecting bay windows on sides of the house flanking both sides of the recessed porch. All other windows are double-hung wood sash windows. The original metal roof was covered with tar paper which has been over-coated with an Acrymax roofing system. There are four original brick chimneys and one 20th century concrete block chimney. A multi-purpose one-story service wing of wood and stone extends from the northeast side of the house. The smallest of the three rooms in the wing apparently served as a privy; the second was a summer kitchen and the largest provided carriage space. Windows in the extension are double hung with original glazing. These windows appear to have been reused because they are older than the house. The carriage house doors have Queen Anne-style glazing with a border of colored glazing. About 30 trees on the property were taken down by the tornado of June 1970 damaging the back porch, roof and some windows. The roof and windows were repaired but the porch was replaced by a concrete patio. The Yale-Cady Octagon House was built by inventor and locksmith Linus Yale, Sr. for his daughter Chlotilda and her husband, Ira Lillibridge Cady, Yale's employee. The property contains the ruins of the former Yale Lock Factory. Yale manufactured locks at the Yale Lock Shop from about 1847 to 1858. The design of the Yale-Cady Octagon House was based on Orson Squire Fowler's book, The Octagon House: A Home for All, published in 1848. To quote from the book, the house "retains all of the peculiarities and advantages of our octagon style, namely compactness, and contnuity of rooms, central stairway, closets and small bed-rooms." The Yale-Cady Octagon House was one of 120 surviving octagon buildings identified in a New York State survey in the 1950's cited in Carl Carmer's 1952 article, "Fowler was Right, or, Notes from the Heart of an Octagon Dweller," published in The Proceedings fo the New York State Historical Association. It is also one of a much smaller sub-group built with load-bearing stone walls, as opposed to frame, brick, gravel-lime wall and cobblestone examples. Probably because of the limestone construction, the house retains a very high degree of architectural integrity; no additions post-dating the original construction have been built directly on to the original footprint.

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