An eight-sided farmhouse a retired carpenter built for himself

Most farmhouses are rectangles because rectangles are easy to build. The Randall House on Treasurer Road near Mayville has eight sides, and a little glass cupola perched on top like a hat, because its owner had read a book.

William Randall was born in Canada in 1815 and spent his working life as a traveling carpenter, taking jobs in Chicago, St. Louis, and wherever else the work was. In 1865 he retired to a farm in Fremont Township and, five years later, started building the strangest house in the county for himself. He had help from local carpenters, and the family moved in around 1872.

The shape wasn’t a whim so much as a fashion. In the 1850s a phrenologist and self-help author named Orson Fowler published “A Home for All,” arguing that the octagon was the ideal home: more floor space inside the same length of wall, better light, better air, better living all around. For a couple of decades a scatter of true believers across the country actually built the things. Most went back to right angles. The Randall House is one of the survivors — seven flat-roofed octagonal sides plus a rectangular wing, with Gothic-pointed windows and that observation cupola up top.

Randall died in 1882, and the farm passed to his son Henry. The house kept standing through everything that flattens old buildings — fire, neglect, the temptation to tear down and start over. In 1976 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, which is the federal government’s way of saying a building is worth keeping.

It’s a private home, not a museum, so you admire it from the road. But there it sits in the open Thumb farmland, eight-sided and stubborn, a carpenter’s retirement project that outlasted the whole fad that inspired it.