Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin
John Richards
Watertown mill owner who designed and built the Octagon House at 919 Charles Street
$687.50
John Richards was the pioneer mill owner who promised Eliza Forbes the finest house in the best town in Wisconsin Territory and then spent three years proving it. The Octagon House at 919 Charles Street, finished in 1854, and the mills on the Rock River are why Watertown still knows his name. He was born in Hinsdale, Massachusetts, in 1806, attended Williams College, and joined the Massachusetts bar before reaching the Rock River in 1837. He fetched Eliza from Albany in 1840 and put her in a cabin while mill hands stacked brick. With Luther Cole and Heber Smith he opened the Rough and Ready flour mill in 1847, then a sawmill and linseed-oil mill on the east bank. The Octagon rose five floors with thirteen-inch brick walls, seventeen-inch stone foundations, a hanging cherry staircase from trees on his land, a rainwater cistern, and furnace heat without chimney breasts. Architect Rexford Newcomb later called it probably the best-planned octagon in the country. He was Jefferson County’s first district attorney and, briefly, mayor. He died in Fond du Lac on February 18, 1874. Eliza died in the house on June 19, 1902. The family stayed until grandson William Thomas died in 1935; the Watertown Historical Society opened the house as a museum in 1938. The kindergarten building on the lawn is Margarethe Schurz’s, moved there in 1956. Richards never lived in Schurz’s villa, and Schurz never lived here. The mills and the house are the city claim.