The mansion in Lansing's Old Town wears a 1903 face over an 1850s house

The big white-columned house near the Grand River in Lansing’s Old Town looks like a turn-of-the-century mansion, and most of what you see is. But underneath that grand front is a much plainer house from the 1850s — and the story of the place is really the story of how one got buried inside the other.

James and Marion Turner built the original home around the late 1850s. James Turner was one of the people who helped get Lansing going as the capital city, so this was a founding family’s house from the start. It passed to their daughter, Abby Turner, who married Frank Dodge — which is how the place ended up with both family names hyphenated onto it.

Around 1900 the Dodges decided the old house wasn’t grand enough. They hired Lansing architect Darius B. Moon to modernize it, and the project, finished in 1903, all but erased the original. Moon wrapped it in the Classical Revival style — tall columns, a formal symmetry, the whole stately look — so thoroughly that the earlier house nearly vanished from view. You’d never guess from the curb that there’s an 1850s home in there at all.

The city of Lansing bought the property in 1974, and today it runs as the Turner-Dodge House and Heritage Center, a museum given over to Lansing’s early pioneers. You can walk through the rooms where a founding family lived, look at the woodwork Moon added, and listen for the older, simpler house hiding behind the columns. It’s a building that put on a new face and kept the old one, brick by brick, just out of sight.