Blissfield's Hathaway House, the white mansion on US-223

You cannot drive through Blissfield on US-223 without clocking it: a big white house wearing a row of tall columns like a Greek temple that took a wrong turn into a Michigan farm town. That is the Hathaway House, and it has been catching eyes from the roadside since the 1850s.

David Carpenter built it around 1851. He was a New York–born merchant and one of the wealthiest men in early Lenawee County, and the house showed it — parlors, a library, more than a dozen rooms, all done up in the columned, temple-fronted Greek Revival style that was the height of fashion in America before the Civil War. It is the kind of place a man builds when he wants the whole township to know he has arrived.

The Carpenter name faded; the Hathaway name, from a later family, is the one that stuck. Starting in 1960 the mansion spent decades as a well-known restaurant, the sort of spot where Lenawee County families went for anniversaries and graduations. That restaurant has since closed and the building has changed hands, but the columns are still standing where Carpenter set them.

The house is on the National Register of Historic Places — listed, fittingly, under its builder’s name as the David Carpenter House — and it carries a Michigan State Historic Site marker too. For a village that grew up on sugar beets and rail freight, it is a reminder that this flat farming corner near the Ohio line once minted enough money to put a temple on Main Street.