Chapter Nine: The Case of the Ingenious A
Table of Contents Chapter Nine: The Case of the Ingenious A 116. Law's 1800 house became the fulcrum of the New Varnum Hotel Some 42 years after Thornton and Tayloe died in 1828 and shortly before his own death, one of the three surviving children of Tayloe, who had thirteen, credited Thornton for designing the Octagon. In an 1888 magazine article about the Octagon, restoration architect Glenn Brown endorsed the family legend. In 1896, he followed up the 1888 article with an article about Thornton's other designs. He credited him for designing and superintending construction of two houses that the General had built just north of the Capitol to house congressmen. Work on the Octagon and the General's house began in 1799. That same year, work began on T homas Law's five story brick house just south of the Capitol. It had oval rooms like the Octagon. In 1901, a lawyer named Allen Clark wrote a dual biography of Greenleaf and Law, but ...