The Honolulu House
Michigan
Just ahead in Marshall stands one of the strangest houses in Michigan. Judge Abner Pratt served as United States Consul to Hawaii under President James Buchanan in the eighteen fifties. He fell so completely in love with the islands that when he returned to Michigan, he built himself a piece of them.
Completed in eighteen sixty, the Honolulu House mimics the open tropical bungalows Pratt had lived in abroad, complete with a wide wraparound veranda and a central observation tower meant to catch island breezes that never came to southwest Michigan. The interior walls are painted with tropical scenes. Pratt himself lived in the house only briefly before his death, but the building survived, and today the Marshall Historical Society operates it as a museum.
It remains a singular artifact: a Hawaiian fantasy dropped into the Michigan prairie by a homesick judge.
