The eight-sided house a Washington Township farmer built to outdo his neighbors

A farmer named Loren Andrus finished a very strange house on Van Dyke in Washington Township in 1860, and almost two centuries later people still drive out just to look at it. It has eight sides.

The octagon craze was a real thing in mid-1800s America. A writer named Orson Fowler talked it up as the healthiest, most sensible shape a home could have — more light, more air, less wasted hallway. Most people read the idea and built a normal square house anyway. Andrus did not. In the late 1850s the well-off families around town were in a quiet contest to put up the most impressive home, and Andrus, with help from his brother-in-law, a local carpenter named David Stewart, decided to win it.

What they built is a two-story brick octagon with eight-foot-tall windows on the first floor and a porch that wraps around most of the sides. At the center, a spiral staircase climbs 55 steps from the ground floor all the way up into the little cupola on the roof. From up there you can see for miles across what used to be all farmland.

There’s a darker layer to the story, too. The house is said to hold tiny crawl spaces and hidden doors that sheltered people escaping slavery before the Civil War — Washington Township sat on routes north toward Canada and freedom.

After the war the octagon became a kind of town center, the place where people gathered. It earned both a spot on the National Register of Historic Places and a Michigan state historic-site marker in the early 1970s. A volunteer group keeps it standing now and opens it for tours, so you can put your hand on that banister and start the long curl up to the cupola yourself.