Vanished Rochester: Wood Dawn

Area residents are probably familiar with the Loren Andrus Octagon House in nearby Washington Township, but may not be aware that the Rochester area once had its very own octagon house, named Wood Dawn. The house disappeared from our local landscape decades before I was born, but fortunately one of the nineteenth-century pamphlets promoting Rochester carried this picture of it, so we have some idea what it looked like.

Wood Dawn stood on a farm just west of the village of Rochester, in the area that we know today as Great Oaks. According to a 1909 memoir by Samuel Harris that was published in the Rochester Era, the octagon house was built by Lyman Wilcox, who owned the property for a large part of the nineteenth century, and stood on the property during the tenure of subsequent owners including Rufus Schermerhorn and dairy farm operator John C. Day. Octagon architecture had become something of a minor sensation in the United States after an amateur architect named Orson Squire Fowler published a book in 1848 touting the benefits of the octagon house. Fowler claimed, among other things, that octagon homes were cheaper to build and heat, afforded more natural light, and provided healthier ventilation.

Rochester's octagon house was described in the Rochester Clarion in the spring of 1939, as it was being razed after Howard McGregor bought the property on which it stood for his Great Oaks Stock Farm. The Clarion said, in part:

One of the many improvements being made on the old J.C. Day farm, west of town, is the razing of the once beautiful stone mansion occupied by its former owner in days gone by.
The structure, octagon shaped, is over 100 years old, three stories high and had 42 rooms. There was a beautiful spiral stairway in the very center of the house leading from the basement direct to the glass enclosed turret three floors above, with two landings between each floor. Every piece of lumber used in the construction of the house was oak.

Wood Dawn was probably not quite 100 years old when it was torn down in 1939, despite the Clarion's claim, but it was definitely an interesting piece of Rochester's early history, now consigned to the pages of vanished Rochester.