Castle Farms

Rising up out of the Northern Michigan woods is something you do not expect to see in a farm town, a genuine stone castle with turrets and courtyards. It is called Castle Farms, and it was built in nineteen eighteen by Albert Loeb, a vice president of the mail-order giant Sears, Roebuck and Company. Loeb was not building a home.

He was building a showpiece. Sears sold everything by catalog in those days, including farm equipment, seed, and livestock supplies, and Loeb wanted a grand model farm to prove that modern methods worked. He hired an architect to design the barns in the style of a French Normandy castle, and the estate sprawled across sixteen hundred acres.

Inside those elegant walls, Loeb bred prize-winning Holstein cattle, Duroc-Jersey hogs, and powerful Belgian draft horses, and ran a premium mail-order business in butter, honey, eggs, and poultry. At its peak the farm was a major employer in the Charlevoix area. But it did not last.

Loeb died in nineteen twenty-four, and the farm shut down only three years later. For decades the castle sat quiet, rented out as storage, slowly crumbling, until a series of owners restored it. Today it lives a third life entirely, as a beloved venue for weddings, gardens, and summer concerts.