How a former consul brought Hawaii to Marshall

Honolulu House can stop you mid-walk. Its broad veranda, observation tower, and green, red, and ivory paint look unlike the brick storefronts and Victorian homes around downtown Marshall. The house mixes Italianate and Gothic Revival details with ideas its builder brought home from Hawaii.

That builder was Abner Pratt, a former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. President James Buchanan appointed him U.S. consul in Honolulu in 1857, when Hawaii was still an independent kingdom. National Archives records say worsening asthma brought Pratt back to Michigan on leave in January 1860. It was his health, not his wife’s, that prompted the return.

The federal record is less postcard-perfect than the usual version of the story. An investigation of financial abuses at the Honolulu consulate and seamen’s hospital gathered allegations involving Pratt and other officials. The Civil War interrupted the matter, so it never reached the kind of tidy conclusion a modern reader might expect.

Back in Marshall, Pratt spent $20,000 on the house. It had fifteen-foot ceilings, an open gallery, an observation platform, and walls painted with island scenes. The National Archives says its design may have drawn from the palace of Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma. That was an earlier palace, not the present Iolani Palace, which was finished in 1882.

Pratt died in 1863, only a few years after the house was finished. A later owner replaced the original tropical murals with a high-Victorian scheme in 1887. The Marshall Historical Society acquired the property in the 1960s and now presents that later interior as a museum. Outside, Honolulu House remains the visual anchor of Marshall’s 1991 National Historic Landmark district, where nearly 800 buildings contribute to the historic streetscape.