Milton House Museum

The Milton House is a hexagon of grout — one of only two nineteenth-century hexagonal buildings left in America — that Joseph Goodrich poured in 1844 as a stagecoach inn on the Wisconsin frontier. Goodrich said he built it hexagonal to watch for attack and out of lime-and-gravel concrete because wooden buildings burned. Orson Fowler saw it in 1850 and carried the idea into A Home for All, the book that launched the octagon-house craze — the Milton House is the seed of an American architectural movement.

The hexagon had a cellar secret. A tunnel roughly forty-five feet long runs from the inn's basement to the cellar of the 1837 Goodrich cabin behind it — built sometime before the inn, purpose unknown, but documented sheltering at least one freedom seeker, Andrew Pratt, whose name survives. Goodrich was an outspoken abolitionist in the years before the war, and his inn sat on the southeastern Wisconsin routes feeding fugitives toward Canada.

The National Historic Landmark designation in 1998 was for the documented Underground Railroad role, not the architecture — though the grout walls are the reason anything survives to document. Tours still go down through the hexagon's cellar and walk the tunnel to the cabin, the only Wisconsin UGRR site where the passage itself can be walked.

The Milton House is the archive's hexagon file — Joseph Goodrich's 1844 grout inn with the documented tunnel to the pioneer cabin, Wisconsin's only walkable Underground Railroad passage and the building that inspired the octagon fad.