On the Pere Marquette river lies on of the most beautiful stretches of private property you’ll ever see.
For this week’s Northern Michigan in Focus, Corey Adkins takes you to the .
He spoke with George Cannon III, who says it is a special place.
“You can look at this and in different lights it looks different all the time and when you see something you go, wow this is a very special place,” Cannon says.
If you ever wanted to transport yourself back in time, the Cannon River Ranch just west of Baldwin may be the place for you.
“I come up here some nights by myself and start a fire in the fireplace and you look up at the woodwork and say, isn’t this special?” Cannon says.
The ranch was built in 1929 by Robert Irwin of the Irwin Furniture Company.
George Cannon bought it in 1954. He owned one of the biggest iron foundry’s in the country at that time.
Along with bringing his family here, he used the property to schmooze a bit.
“He used it to bring up customers and vendors,” Cannon says. “My father and my uncle had a company and brought up their customers too. I ran a sand company down in southern Ohio and I did the same.”
The main attraction, the Pere Marquette River, has been described as one of the best brown trout rivers in the country.
“This is a great stretch of river to fish,” Cannon says. “It has nice gravel beds and nice deep holes.”
The Pere Marquette is a wild and scenic river, which means no motors are allowed. The Cannon River Ranch owns seven miles of land around the river, 700 acres total.
“I don’t know if anybody else that has anything like this on a wild and scenic river,” Cannon says. “We have one of the few bridges that cross the mainstream of the river and we have nice docks to fish off, which are grandfathered in because you can’t put new docks on the river and going down takes an hour to canoe one end to the other.”
But as the river flows, so does time—and so do priorities.
George and his family had to make a hard call.
“It’s been in our family for 65 years and I think it’s time to have another caretaker of the property,” he says. “I don’t think anybody really owns property, you’re just looking after it for a while, and I’ve taken the best care that we’ve can of it.”
There’s four other homes on the property for rentals and a caretakers house.
“Between the tackle house and this main lodge it sleeps 15, and if you add up all the beds on the property, it adds up to 43 beds,” Cannon says.
In short, the Cannon River Ranch is the perfect place to close your eyes and go back in time.
“It’s a place to disconnect from the hectic day to day lifestyle,” Cannon says.
© 2023 - 910 Media Group