Claude Shannon's "Entropy House"

Built in 1858, the house was constructed for Ellen Dwight, a great-granddaughter of a genius tinkerer of an earlier era, Thomas Jefferson. Originally seated on twelve acres, its design was inspired by Monticello. Encircled by “a three-sided verandah with segmental openings and chamfered posts,” the house was a stately three stories at the crest of a “broad expanse of lawn reaching down to the wooded shore of Upper Mystic Lake.” Toward the end of Shannon’s life, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, with the citation noting its “panoramic views of the lake and distant hills,” as well as a sumptuous interior:

The focal point of the plan is the first floor octagonal room. It contains a parquet floor said to be laid in a pattern identical to a floor at Monticello. The elaborate yellow marble fireplace surround has acanthus leaf, waterleaf and egg and dart moldings. Ceilings of the first story are approximately twelve feet in height; the ceilings are embellished with ornate plaster moldings around the perimeter. Windows of the lower story are full-length six-light windows, which when raised, provide egress to the verandah. The right parlor/library has a green marble fireplace.

The house would figure prominently in Shannon’s public image. Nearly every story about him, from 1957 on, situated him at the house on the lake—usually in the two-story addition that the Shannons built as an all-purpose room for gadget storage and display, a space media profiles often dubbed the “toy room,” but which his daughter Peggy and her two older brothers simply called “Dad’s room.”

The Shannons gave their home a name: Entropy House. Claude’s status as a mathematical luminary would make it a pilgrimage site for students and colleagues, especially as his on-campus responsibilities dwindled toward nothing.