The abolitionist, vegetarian, octagon-obsessed utopia that never was
They loathed meat and right angles as much as they hated slavery, so this group of 19th century East Coasters founded a city in Kansas.
(This article is the second in a 5-part series about experimental utopias.)
In 1848, phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler wrote a treatise diagnosing what he called “defects in the usual shape of houses.” Wood and brick were objectionable, he contended, as were squares and rectangles. The ideal house was a gravel-walled octagon. “Is the right angle the best angle?” he asked rhetorically. “Why not employ some other mathematical figures as well as the square?” He noted that “fruits, eggs, tubers, nuts… are made spherical in order to enclose the most material in the least compass.” He thus argued that the octagon, being a feasible and economical architectural shape that comes closer to a sphere than a square does, offers more inside space per outside wall — and has the added benefit of being naturally harmonious and comfortable.
Phrenology — a pseudoscience based on measurements of the human skull — is now a discredited field, but Fowler’s architectural contributions in A Home for All weren’t unsound. The book contained detailed instructions for building his ideal house, all perfectly reasonable from a design standpoint. From Mississippi to Wisconsin and from Key West to San Francisco, builders successfully realized his vision. But there was one place where his plan failed, through no fault of Fowler’s own. That was Octagon City, Kansas — a utopian vegetarian community that never quite took root.
Vegetarianism, like octagonal home design, was enjoying a small surge in popularity in the 1840s. The rise of industrial capitalism had brought with it new meat processing and transportation technologies — like crowded livestock trains and unrefrigerated industrial slaughterhouses — which were profitable but far from hygienic. Meat was prone to taint, and vegetarians advocated avoiding it on the grounds that it was likely to be diseased. But there was also an ethical dimension. A subset of mid-19th century vegetarians also believed that eating meat was morally unjustifiable. Many likened meat production and consumption to slavery, and there was also a movement of vegetarians who felt that meat-eating contributed to economic inequality. To be oriented toward social-justice in the mid-19th century meant, as it does today, to at least entertain the relative moral merits of vegetarianism.
One person was taken simultaneously with Fowler’s octagonal advocacy and the vegetarian ideology — a British man named Henry Clubb, who moved to New York City in the 1850s. Clubb was a strident abolitionist, first and foremost, and abolitionism and vegetarianism were closely linked at the time. He worked at the New York Tribune under the tutelage of its founder, abolitionist Horace Greeley, who compared the adoption of a vegetarian diet to the experience of an alcoholic going sober. “Other things being equal,” Greeley wrote, “I judge that a strict vegetarian will live ten years longer than a habitual flesh-eater, while suffering, in the average, less than half so much from sickness as the carnivorous must.”
Clubb worked to promote the American Vegetarian Society while at the same time writing fiery, principled abolitionist columns for the newspaper. When Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, leaving those states’ status as either free or slaveholding indeterminate, Clubb came up with a plan to further both causes at once: he would settle a group of vegetarian abolitionists in Kansas. The purpose of his colony would be to both experiment with full vegetarian self-sufficiency and influence the state against slavery.
Clubb bought ads in Eastern newspapers, which read, “Hasten you lovers of carrots, you eaters of unbolted grain!” In 1855, dozens of vegetarian abolitionists gathered in New York to discuss the Kansas settlement, which would be founded on the principles of economic equality (everyone would purchase and own an equal share of the venture) and strict vegetarian living. Over the coming months, more than a hundred people expressed their interest in the venture. Clubb screened the applicants carefully, and in the end fifty families were selected based on their demonstrated commitment to both abolitionism and vegetarianism.
In his 2015 book The Vegetarian Crusade, Adam Shrpintzen writes, “Colonists were required to sign an oath promising to abstain from intoxicating liquors, tobacco, and animal flesh as a precondition of residency.” As Clubb began to draft the plans, he drew inspiration from Orson Squire Fowler, who himself was a member of the American Vegetarian Society; the two knew each other well, and Fowler even published some of Clubb’s writings. A vision emerged for Octagon City, a place where all dwellings would be eight-sided, and would each face inward toward a larger octagon, which would contain a school, park, church, library, and meetinghouse. Members would own their individual dwellings privately — as well as a plot of arable farmland in the rear of each house — and possess equal shares in the central edifice. The design would promote the values of health, resourcefulness, communalism, and, of course, the best use of space.
“Vegetarians were already familiar with community living in urban boardinghouses,” writes Shprintzen. Octagon City “offered residents the best of both worlds — a private home inside of a communal land mass. This undoubtedly appealed to vegetarians, who were the living incarnation of the competing forces of urban sophistication and rural romanticism.” In 1856, a tract of land was purchased, and settlers enthusiastically began planning for the journey.
Octagon City was one of many anti-slavery settlements being planned for Kansas at the time, and Northeastern newspapers wrote approvingly of the plan. Midwestern newspapers were less kind. The Chicago Tribune published a mocking article stating that “philosophers, fiddlers, phrenologists, vegetarians, etc.” were no match for the frontier, which was fit only for “beef-eating men.” This didn’t deter the vegetarians, who set out on the difficult 1,200 mile journey by way of wagon, boat, and foot. The early settlers immediately began building, but they were slow-going, and by the time the second wave arrived they’d completed very little. Shprintzen notes:
There was no library, agricultural college, or even octagon-shaped dwelling. Just one new home was constructed, a basic log cabin with a dirt floor… Henry S. Clubb — the mastermind behind the settlement — lived in an abandoned Osage wigwam, a reminder of the changes wrought by continued Euro-American expansion into the West. The remaining residents lived in cloth-covered shacks… The sprawling octagonal settlement that was promised offered only two ovens, one plow, no sawmill, no grist-mill, and no octagons.
Some newcomers left almost immediately upon arrival. Others, perhaps harboring realistic expectations of hardship, were more determined. For a while, they continued working to build the colony, subsisting well enough on a “diverse diet of wild peas and beans, beds of onions, boiled greens, Johnny cakes, pumpkins, squash, melons, cucumbers, and potatoes.” But it was obvious to all that they were not prepared for the coming winter, and the looming threat of starvation — coupled with burgeoning conflict with pro-slavery neighbors, who naturally didn’t take kindly to a group of cosmopolitan abolitionist vegetarian octagon-dwellers — led many to flee in October of 1857.
A few vegetarians stayed in the region, even after it became clear the colony would never recover. The ones who remained developed friendships with the local Osage Indians, who would often share food and dine with the vegetarians, and teach them the best practices for growing vegetables in the Kansas soil. Shprintzen notes that the Osage folklore actually contains reference to vegetarians; the tribe was said to have been born of a union between two competing tribes, one exclusively hunters and the others exclusively farmers. The Osage called their vegetarian ancestors the “peace people.” Perhaps this is why they took so kindly to the refugees of Octagon City.
As for those who left, many were active in the Bleeding Kansas controversy over the state’s slave status, and some died fighting against the Confederacy during the Civil War. One even joined John Brown’s abolitionist brigade, seeing “no conflict between his dietary choices and the use of violence against slave interests.” Clubb, too, was a volunteer for the Union Army.
Octagon City may have been a failure, but it’s a testament to the dedication of its settlers that so many of their names show up in the history of the fight against slavery. When people say vegetarians aren’t tough, they always leave that part out.
