A Homesick Judge Built a Hawaiian Mansion in Small-Town Michigan

Drive through the small mid-Michigan town of Marshall and you’ll do a double take. There, on a tree-lined street, sits what looks like a tropical island mansion — a broad wraparound veranda, a pagoda-like tower, and a paint scheme straight out of the South Pacific. It’s called the Honolulu House, and the story behind it is just as unexpected as the building.

In the 1850s, a Marshall man named Abner Pratt was a big deal: a former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. In 1857, President James Buchanan appointed him United States Consul to the Sandwich Islands — the old name for Hawaii, back when it was still an independent kingdom. Pratt spent a few years in Honolulu and fell in love with the place.

When he returned home around 1860, partly for his wife Eliza’s health, he couldn’t shake the islands. So he built a house to bring a piece of Hawaii back to Michigan. He gave it a tropical-style veranda and tower, raised the ceilings to a soaring fifteen feet, and had the interior walls painted with tropical plants and scenes. Some locals like to say it echoes the royal palace in Honolulu.

Pratt didn’t get to enjoy it long — he died only a few years after it was finished. The house passed through several families, and in the early 1960s the Marshall Historical Society bought it and turned it into a museum.

The whole town is worth a wander. Marshall once hoped to become Michigan’s state capital (Lansing won that prize), and it kept so many beautiful old buildings that it’s now one of the country’s largest National Historic Landmark districts — a place historians have called a textbook of 19th-century American architecture. But the Honolulu House is the showstopper: a little slice of the tropics, hiding in plain sight in southern Michigan.