Honolulu House
Michigan
In downtown Marshall stands one of the most eccentric houses in Michigan: the Honolulu House, built in eighteen sixty by Abner Pratt, who had served as United States consul to Hawaii. Pratt fell in love with Hawaiian architecture during his posting and returned to Michigan determined to recreate it. The result is a white-painted Italianate mansion topped with a pagoda-like observation tower and surrounded by wide verandas designed to catch tropical breezes that Michigan's winters promptly disprove.
Pratt painted the interior with tropical murals and installed wide-open porches suited to Honolulu, not a Michigan winter. He died in eighteen sixty-three, about three years after completing it. The house eventually became a general store, then an apartment building, before the Marshall Historical Society acquired it in nineteen sixty-one.
It is now a museum open to the public, preserved as the strangest surviving reminder of the Victorian passion for exotic architecture in ordinary midwestern towns.
