Dr. William Thornton, the architect of the Octagon, was remarkable for his talents, benevolence and eccentricities. He was the first architect of the Capitol at Washington, and was appointed one of the three original commissioners to lay off the city. At the request of Jefferson, he furnished designs for the University of Virginia. He was born in the West Indies, of Quaker parentage, and educated in England and Scotland. A man of science, he was head of the Patent Office from the time of Washington’s administration to that of Monroe, and claimed to have preceded Fulton in the application of steam as a propeller of boats, and to have made experiments on the Delaware before Fulton made his on the Hudson. This claim naturally brought the two into collision, and their quarrel consisted in writing pamphlets against each other, apropos of which, Thornton is said to have declared: “I killed Fulton with that last pamphlet of mine!” Dr. Thornton married the daughter of an English lady who kept a fashionable school for young ladies in Philadelphia, and is reputed to have stood much in awe of both his wife and mother-in-law—a condition of mind which finds scant compensation in worldly honors. The ladies were allies in their opposition to his leaning toward the turf, to which, despite his Quaker blood, the Doctor was passionately addicted. This brought him into close association with Colonel Tayloe, and their deaths occurred in the same year, 1828. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Tayloe retired from society, although she continued to make the Washington house her principal home until her death, nearly thirty years later. One of her granddaughters, yet living in the District, is authority for the fact that for more than fifty years the Octagon was lighted solely by candles. Although gas was introduced prior to Mrs. Tayloe’s death, she would never permit its use in the Octagon, looking upon it as a “dangerous innovation,” and clinging to her candles to the last. The granddaughter remembers as one of the distinct impressions of her childhood, the sockets over the doorways which held these wax illuminators. The Tayloe occupancy of the Octagon ceased with Mrs. John Tayloe’s death, in 1855, though its ownership did not pass from the family until its purchase by the American Institute of Architects, in 1903. Between the dates 1855 and 1865, the Catholic Sisters of St. Matthew’s Parish taught a girls’ school in the Octagon, and from 1866 to 1879 it was leased by the government for the “Hydrographic Office,” incorporated by Congress in 1866 as a branch of the Navy Department. Then for nearly twenty years the Octagon was given over to silence, cobwebs, mice and ghosts, the last the inevitable tenants of all deserted dwellings which have been the scene of departed grandeur.