Loss of Packard House a shame

In a county that treasures history and historic preservation it’s hard to believe that Jason Packard’s 8-sided house was allowed to crumble away.  
It didn’t rot—he made it of stone—it just fell apart following decades of neglect.  
A shame, in part because of the contrast between the mansions built by East Hill capitalists and the simple, efficient, and durable structure put together by a man most people thought eccentric.  
The house Packard built represented a way of life he believed in.
Jason Packard was not well understood, perhaps because not many in Montgom-ery County at the time knew or cared much about Transcendentalism.    
Packard, his wife Cornelia, and a circle of friends not only read Thoreau and Emerson and other Transcendentalists, they studied them.  
A core belief of Transcendentalism is that man, through simple, wholesome living and a meticulous understanding of the inner being can transcend materialism and religious doctrine to become one with nature.  
Or something like that.  
Transcendentalism of the mid 1800s argued that government was too big, took too many liberties.  
Thoreau once went to jail for not paying his taxes—he refused to pay because our government had entered into a war he felt was wrong.  
Thoreau held the bizarre position that money a person earned should not be confiscated by the government and spent on things that person believed unjust.      
Jason Packard came here from Michigan in the late 1850s. Frankfort was still the county seat.  
He was well-educated, argued law although he was not a lawyer, wrote editorials that were published in newspapers from Omaha to Burlington, exchanged a letter with Abraham Lincoln, and served as a county official for several years.  
He studied nature and experimented with vegetables and trees.  He believed mansions were a decadent waste and practiced what he preached.  
Packard could have afforded a fine home in town, but he emulated Thoreau and the Walden Pond experience by building a two-room rural cabin, one room above the other, with a sub-floor heating system he designed.  
He looked for energy efficiency, ways to make the best use of space and sun and shade and doors and windows, and with what he learned he designed and built the stone house near Stennett.  
The place was an octagon with the sides and angles being equal, the northern exposure partially tucked into a hillside.  
The floor, like the walls, was of carefully selected stone.  He heated with his own form of central-air, constructed a second story by stretching wires upon which to lay the flooring, leaving an open area around the perimeter to transfer warm air in the winter, cool in the summer.  T
he windows were stacked—second story a continuation of those on the lower level.  
Observers, according to Merritt’s history, looked on with amusement. The place was too small, too simple, too primitive.  
Packard cared not. By all accounts Jason and Cornelia were well-pleased. They lived and studied there, reading classics and leading a group in discussions about science and nature and philosophy and life and death and the meaning of it all.  
The Packards were interested in accumulating understanding and knowledge—not wealth.
With old age at hand Jason Packard selected a lot in the Red Oak cemetery. Merritt writes that Packard picked a boulder and designed a monument. He chiseled out an epitaph, partially in Latin, which said he felt he had “lived in a world of enchantment,” and that at last his “fortune had been made.”  
Too bad his stone house went to ruin.            
Roy Marshall is a local historian and a columnist for The Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.