Thirty-two rooms and eight marble fireplaces in Jonesville

Eight marble fireplaces, each a different color, sit in the Grosvenor House on Maumee Street in Jonesville — one of the odder flexes you’ll find in a small Michigan town. The man who paid for them, Ebenezer O. Grosvenor, could afford it.

Grosvenor came to Jonesville in 1840, went into the mercantile trade, and started the local savings bank. Then he went into politics: a seat in the Michigan Senate, a term as lieutenant governor, two terms as state treasurer. He also served on the commission that built Michigan’s State Capitol — which is how he ended up hiring Elijah E. Myers, the architect of that Capitol, to design his house.

Myers gave him an Italianate mansion in 1874, finished in 1875: thirty-two rooms, twelve-foot ceilings, a sweeping balustraded staircase, walnut window valances carved with Egyptian heads, and those eight colored-marble fireplaces. Grosvenor lived in it until he died in 1910.

The Jonesville Heritage Association acquired the place in 1977 and runs it now as the Grosvenor House Museum, the same year it landed on the National Register of Historic Places and earned a Michigan State Historic Site marker. Walking through it is a strange kind of time travel — a banker’s idea of grandeur from the 1870s, preserved room by room, in a village most people only know from the highway sign. The architect who shaped the dome in Lansing built this one private house an hour south, and it’s still standing to prove it.