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Plans for his octagon house

Orson Squire Fowler (1809 - 1887), phrenologist, popularized the octagon house in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Orson Squire Fowler, the son of Horace and Martha (Howe) Fowler, was born in Cohocton, New York, October 11, 1809. He prepared for college at Ashland Academy and studied at Amherst College, graduating in the class of 1834. With his brother Lorenzo Niles Fowler he opened a phrenological office in New York City, and wrote and lectured on phrenology, preservation of health, popular education and social reform from 1834 to 1889. He edited and published the American Phrenological Journal, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1838 to 1842. He was a partner with Fowler & Wells, publishers, New York, from 1846 to 1854, residing in Fishkill, New York and Elizabeth, New Jersey. He moved his office to Boston in 1863, residing in Manchester from 1863 to 1880, and resided in Sharon, New York, from 1883 to his death in Sharon on August 18, 1887.

Fowler was married three times: to Mrs. Eliza (Brevoort) Chevalier; to Mrs. Mary (Aiken) Poole; and to Abbie L. Ayres. He had three children.

The town of Fowler, Colorado is named for Fowler.

• Memory and intellectual improvement (1841)
• Physiology, Animal and Mental (1842)
• Matrimony, or Phrenology applied to the Selection of Companions (1842)
• Self Culture and Perfection of Character (1843)
• Education and Self-improvement
• Hereditary Descent, its Laws and Facts applied to Human Improvement (1843)
• Love and Parentage (1844)
• The Self Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology (1849), with Lorenzo Fowler
• Sexual Science (1870)
• Phrenology proved, illustrated and applied
• Amativeness
• Human Science
• Creative and Sexual Science, or Manhood, Womanhood, and their Interrelations (1875)
• The Octagon House: A Home for All

• Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher." Doubleday, 2006.
• Stern, Madeleine. "Heads & Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers." University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.

• Fowler's entry in Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, 1889
• Orson Squire Fowler: Phrenology and Octagon Houses by John H. Martin
• Information about a Fowler trip to Colorado
• Octagon House in Upstate New York
• Inventory of octagon houses