It Happened Here --The Professional Locksmith and the Amateur Architect 

Rte 28, Newport

In the fifty years or so since the end of the revolution Herkimer County had begun to fill out with new towns and new people, descendants of the colonists that stuck it out through the difficult days of the revolution, and new comers attracted by the rich farmlands and relative wealth of new communities. Linus Yale's family moved from Connecticut, settling in Stafford township, Herkimer Co., an area of undeveloped wilderness, a generation before. 

Linus, something of a mechanical genius, patented  an invention for dressing (re-cutting) mill stones, two patents for improving saw mill equipment and three patents for improvements to threshing machinery before starting his own lock-smith business, in the village of Newport, about 1840.  The prosperity of New York in the first decades of the 19th century led to the growth and proliferation of banks, and banks needed locks on their safes and vaults to secure their depositors assets. Most existing bank locks, however, were massive crude affairs with keys that turned two or three levers within the mechanism that held a bolt in place. The large keyholes themselves offered access for skilled lock-pickers to manipulate the locks, or for the less sophisticated, the keyholes might be packed with explosives! Making custom-built locks for banks, Yale produced and patented some of the first combination locks that did away with the need for keyholes.

A little later, Yale began to develop the cylinder/pin/tumbler mechanism, the "Yale Lock," that became the world's most popular mechanical locking mechanism. In that mechanism a key was inserted in a cylinder, and turned, that released the bolt. The cylinder, however, would turn only if a row of spring-loaded pins of varying lengths was pushed out the way by a key with the corresponding number and profile of projections. Further security was added designing key slots which would accept only keys of corresponding widths and patterns of slots.

Yale patented his first pin/tumbler safe lock in 1844, producing his first "Yale lock" at his Newport shop in 1847. In 1850, Linus Yale, Jr. joined his father, bringing his considerable artistic/draftsman talents to the business, and producing many improvement to his father's creations.

American prosperity in the mid 19th century created not only a demand for locks to secure people's bank deposits, but also a demand for locks to secure their personal property, whether it was deeds and stocks and bonds in strong boxes, or thoroughbreds or prized heffers in stables and barns.  In 1857 the Yale's received their first patent for the iconic Yale padlock.

In 1848 another innovative thinker and promoter, Orson Squire Fowler, a nationally famous lecturer, writer and publisher of books on Phrenology wrote a book, The Octagon House: a Home for All, or a New Cheap, Convenient and Superior Mode of Building.  Fowler, a proponent of Phrenology, a "science" that purported to be able to assess personality by studying the bumps and concavities of a person's skull had broadened his interests into other areas, becoming what the twentieth first century might call a "life style guru" writing about everything from "Memory and Intellectual Improvement" to "Self Culture and Perfection of Character" to  bearing and nursing children, and "Creative and Sexual Science", etc.  Fowler's octagon house book was received with enthusiasm and perhaps two thousand octagon houses were built from Maine to San Francisco, with the most built in New York State. Fowler, who made a fortune from his lectures, his consulting practice and his Phrenology publishing house, built a four storey 60 room octagonal mansion in his hometown of Fishkill, NY. that became known as Fowler's Folley.

Fowler asserted that octagon houses were a more efficient use of space; that eight sides provided more space for windows and with a central cupola provided better ventilation; that each room typically had only one external wall (unlike conventional houses where all the corner rooms had two)--and thus were warmer in winter; and that they were cheaper to build. Unfortunately, he also advocated that octagonal houses be built of concrete. His own house made of burnt lime and gravel, without the benefit of steel reinforcing rods by 1897 had become a dangerous crumbling ruin that had to be dynamited.

Octagonal and multiple sided buildings had, on occasion, been built before Fowler's time, often as barns for cattle and hay storage. 


1835 13 Sided Barn 
Bronck House Hist.Site
Rte 9W, Coxsackie

Rte. 28, Newport

Around 1850 Linus Yale was looking to build a house for his daughter and her new husband.  No doubt inspired by Fowler and  perhaps impressed by his arguments he built her this handsome limestone block octagon house on property next to his workshop. 

Some other Octagon Houses:

                                                                           

                                                      

Denton Octagon Hse. 1853, Castle St., Geneva

David VanGelder
Octagon House, 1860
Walnut St., Catskill

1854 Octagon House, Rte 30, Fultonham

                                                                                                       
The Markers of the Week --More early NYSHM's from Schuylerville

Rte 4, across from Schuyler House

 
Like last week's Reidesel
Marker, this too has a gold
ball but is cut out of flat
post stock.

A strange scroll motif, Rte 4, S of Schuylerville

One of two or three, in town,
mounted on concrete slabs.



(I guess we can assume a
burial like this was for the 
convenience of the burial party
and didn't have any symbolic
meaning (?!)