Octagon City in Territorial Kansas
"A pioneer party of members of the Octagon and Vegetarian Settlement Companies, with their families, have arrived at the site selected for them, on the Neosho river... The first settlement, surveyed on the Octagon plan, is on a site peculiarly adapted for the purpose...A building is now being erected at that point, the first stone having been laid on the 28th of April...The members of the companies include nearly one hundred individuals...One member present is a native of Switzerland--one of Scotland--seven of England---five of New York--five of Pennsylvania--one of Ohio, and one of Canada...There are eight children, including an infant, born on the route. The mother, being a practical Vegetarian, did not detain the wagon more than one day. She has borne the hardships and exposure of the journey without complaint, and is enjoying excellent health...Vegetarians generally are in robust health and good spirits... "
-Henry Clubb, Kansas Herald of Freedom, May 3, 1856
It is of little matter that Clubb's vision ultimately failed--the settlement lost the support of followers who disagreed on the importance of diet. Clubb is significant because he used his positions as journalist, lecturer, and head-of-colony to extend the scope of vegetarian ideals beyond food to the realm of Christian moralism, as the newspaper article above shows. Clubb was widely published, and his sermons as a reverend included allusions to women suffrage and especially abolitionism.
There were big plans for the colony, though it seemed to disappoint many of the settlers who enthusiastically went West for the prospect of an enlightened colony. Vegetarianism was central to this groups' message that included strains of Radical Republicanism, and this diet was to be fueled by communally owned and worked farmlands. These more radical ideas did not lose strength after this failure, though vegetarianism was seen as unrealistic for a community in "Bleeding Kansas." Whatever disagreements developed at Neosho over diet, the settlers' and Clubb's beliefs encompassed other ideals such as temperance, abolitionism, and suffrage that survived in a package beyond the failure of this settlement. Vegetarians here also gave an outlet for the strange geometry science of Orson Squire Fowler--hence the name Octagon City.
Phrenology and geometry
Fowler was a phrenologist who published and lectured widely on community design around octagons. Buildings and towns, he believed, should be organized octagonally, to get closer to a circular shape than a traditional square house. Right angles were inefficient for holding space and quite possibly unhealthy, Fowler asserted. "Fruits, eggs, tubers, and nuts...are made spherical in order to enclose the most material in the least compass." Fowler's 1848 treatise, "The Octagon House: A Home For All, or A New, Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building" explained this message. Clubb embraced it. However the difficulty of building Octagon homes was only one of the struggles that hit Clubb's commune in Neosho, Kansas.
At the outset of the venture, Henry Clubb initially wanted to restrict the membership for Octagon City to vegetarians only. However the investors he had secured worried about the fate of the commune if Clubb was authoritarian about diet. The initial settlement was encouraging, with one hundred individuals traveling to territorial Kansas for the community. They were set to build 64 plots within an octagon plan, with communally owned property in the middle. However, when the first settlers arrived there was a single cabin, a plow, and many, many mosquitoes. Within a year, the colony had puttered out of existence.
First hand accounts exist in a memoir by Watson Stewart. He wrote on the downfall of the company as a member, including his initial impression of Clubb, "a man of no experience of Western life." Still he signed the oath and went on his way to Neosho. Stewart writes about his discomfort once in Kansas not to betray his anti-slavery and vegetarian sympathies around the slave owners and advocates. While this played a major role in the collapse of Octagon City, Stewart gave another hint to the settlement's failure.
Legacy of the settlement at Neosho"One great difficulty with most of the members of the Company was their inability to adapt themselves to conditions unavoidable in frontier life; their expectations were too great as to the comforts and conveniences to be found...altogether unable to adjust themselves to frontier life."
In the 1880s, a historian wrote in a Kansas newspaper that he doubted whether the city ever was truly built, because he could find no evidence of the roads or ruins that would have been left by the community. He also noted, somewhat begrudgingly, that the site is now occupied by "beef-eating Jayhawkers."
For some in Kansas, the Octagon City is a source of pride, a historical allusion to advocates of human rights and abolitionism in Territorial Kansas history. It seems, though, that this settlement was chased out by poor preparation, romanticized expectations of Kansas, and harassment from antebellum slavery advocates. Other groups in neighboring states built communities with similar ideals to Clubb's bunch, such as the Harmonial Vegetarian Society established in 1860 Arkansas. A group of seventeen anarchists established this colony in Benton County as a protest against slavery and meat-eating, but they were quickly disbanded by the chaos that was the outbreak of the Civil War. It is curious to wonder what would have happened to the Octagon City at Neosho had it survived into the war years. Alas, the settlers in the end packed up having been there less than a year, and many returned to the east.
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