The octagon shaped Pottawatomie County Fair Pavilion in Onaga, Kansas was built in 1921.
It states at the website, The Onaga Kansas Area Chamber of Commerce http://www.onagakansas.org/fairpavilion.htm :
“This building is in immediate danger of collapse, has been placed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places, placed on the Kansas Preservation Alliance 2004 List of Most Endangered Historic Places, and received a $90,000 Heritage Trust Grant in June 2004 from the Kansas State Historical Society.” The grant money isn’t enough to repair the Pavilion and funds are trying to be raised for more to cover all the costs.
There is also a big website of the history and genealogy of Onaga, Pottawatomie County, Kansas and surrounding areas:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~onagakansas/
Copyright © 2008 by Anna Surface. All Rights Reserved.
Preston Surface
2 Comments
We have quite a few octagonal barns in the state - wonder why the buildings were erected that way?
Hi Barbara. Well, your ‘wonder why’ question got me to thinking and researching. So far, from what I have found, this may be the only octagonal building in Kansas.
Here is what I had found about octagonal buildings on Wikipedia:
Octagon-shaped buildings and structures are both a 19th Century American fad and a building shape.
The architectural fad or movement began in the 19th Century in the United States. It was promoted by Orson Fowler, author of The Octagon House: A Home for All. The result was the construction of a few thousand homes, along with barns . Although the antebellum mansion Longwood in Natchez, Mississippi, may be the best known example of this fad, most of the buildings and structures are found on the East Coast and Mid-West. Robert Kline has a website that tracks Octagon buildings. Mr. Kline’s research has concluded that New York has the most remaining octagon buildings, and he has documented at least one residence in every state except Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Utah.
Octagon-shaped buildings not associated with this fad were designed either for function (ie, lighthouses and churches) or as an aesthetic design decision (i.e, Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest). The oldest known octagon-shaped building is the Tower of the Winds in Athens, Greece, which was constructed circa 300 B.C.
This list is intended to include buildings that were part of the American architectural fad, as well as earlier buildings that may have influenced the fad - much as the founding fathers consciously chose the architecture of Republican Rome when they constructed the United States Capitol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_octagonal_buildings_and_structures
Orson Squire Fowler
The leading promoter of eight-sided structures in the U.S. was Orson Squire Fowler. Fowler was America’s foremost lecturer and writer on phrenology, the pseudoscience of defining an individual’s characteristics by the contours of the head. In the middle of the 19th century, Fowler made his mark on American architecture when he touted the advantages of octagonal homes over rectangular and square structures in his widely publicized book, The Octagon House: A Home for All. According to Fowler, an octagon house was cheaper to build, allowed for additional living space, received more natural light, was easier to heat, and remained cooler in the summer. This last attribute was an important point when the ruling principles of Victorian air conditioning were, generally, avoid direct sun and pray for a breeze.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octagon_house
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