Mountain View Plantation, known as the Octagon House, was the home of the Abijah Thomas family in Southwest Virginia and reflected a family history that the account traces from Stephen Hopkins, an ancestor linked to Jamestown, the Mayflower, and the Mayflower Compact, through later generations in Virginia. John Thomas, born in 1733 in Massachusetts, migrated to this area of Virginia in 1771, and his son Thomas Thomas became a surveyor, justice, sheriff for a time, and overseer of roads in what later became Smyth County; family tradition also holds that Abijah Thomas's mother, Freelove Cole Thomas, suggested naming Marion for Francis Marion. Born on the Thomas home place in 1814, Abijah Thomas married Priscilla Cavinette Scott, raised twelve children, managed the original four hundred acre homestead and thousands of additional acres, and developed major enterprises including the Holston Woolen Mills, an iron furnace, a tannery, and later a cotton mill in Alexandria, making him notable as an unusually important industrialist in an overwhelmingly agrarian antebellum South. He built the octagonal brick house on a knoll overlooking the South Fork River bottom lands, using bricks molded and fired by the plantation's enslaved workers and heavy timber construction, with thick exterior walls, mortise and tenon framing, iron reinforcement in places, elaborate plasterwork, painted decoration, six fireplaces, ten bedrooms, triangular rooms and closets, thirty-two windows, and verandas and balconies with views of the Blue Ridge Mountains; completed in 1858, it was an ambitious and unusual expression of his progressive vision. That prosperity was brief, as the Civil War brought destruction to the plantation system, the iron foundry was destroyed by an invading army, enslaved people were freed, lawsuits by creditors reduced the estate, and after Abijah died at the house on December 1, 1876, Priscilla and their surviving children faced the breakup of the property. The home place was eventually sold at auction, and over time the house passed through successive owners and was used as an apartment building, an apple storage facility, and a tobacco barn by the 1940s, falling into serious disrepair. In 2014, the Octagon House Foundation, Inc. was formed after the house and land were gifted for restoration, and in 2015 the house was designated one of Virginia's most endangered historic structures. The restoration effort aims to preserve the building, restore its historic appearance, and present the full history of the plantation, including the lives and labor of the enslaved people whose work built and sustained it, through interpreted tours, reconstructed support structures, demonstrations of historic trades and agriculture, and broader community use of the grounds.