There’s a stretch of Monroe County, just east of Interstate 75 and a few minutes shy of Lake Erie, where the land still does what it was always meant to do. It grows things. The fields lie flat and open under a wide sky, the tree lines run straight along the section roads, and in the evening the light comes in low off the lake and turns the whole place gold.
This spring, Harmony Hills Ventures closed on roughly 51 acres of that ground in Berlin Charter Township, outside the community of Newport. It’s been a working farm for generations. We intend to keep the best of what it is while giving it a new purpose: four to five residential homesites, each ten acres or more, with electric service and municipal water at the road.
Where It Sits
Newport is an old place by Michigan standards. French settlers were here by 1830 and called the stream that runs through town Rivière aux Signes, the river of swans. It’s Swan Creek now, and it still winds east for about five miles before it empties into Lake Erie at a sandy point the locals call Newport Beach.
Our farm sits within walking distance of that creek. Follow it toward the lake and you come to Swan Yacht Basin, a family marina that’s been putting southeast Michigan boaters on the water for more than fifty years. From there it’s a short run out to the open lake, to the sandbars, and to some of the best walleye and perch fishing anywhere on the Great Lakes.
That’s the first thing worth knowing about this property. You can own ten acres of quiet farmland and keep a boat ten minutes away.
The second thing is what surrounds it. To the north lies Pointe Mouillee State Game Area, some 7,400 acres of marsh and open water at the mouth of the Huron River, part of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge. Three hundred species of birds pass through there. Waterfowl hunters know it well. So do the people who simply like to walk out on the dikes at dawn and watch the sky fill up.
A few miles beyond that is Lake Erie Metropark, with its hiking and biking trails, a regulation golf course, a wave pool, and cross-country skiing in the winter. To the south, past the city of Monroe, is Sterling State Park, the only Michigan state park on Lake Erie, with a mile of sandy shoreline, a modern campground, and a trail system that connects to the River Raisin National Battlefield.
And yet, for all of that, Detroit is about forty minutes up I-75. Toledo is about the same in the other direction. Detroit Metro Airport is closer than either. This is rural living within reach of two major cities, which is a combination that doesn’t come along often.
The Kind of Home That Belongs Here
We picture it this way. A long gravel drive off the county road, bending once so the house isn’t visible from the pavement. A home with a wide porch that faces the evening light. A detached barn or shop with a lean-to for the tractor and the boat trailer. A garden that gets bigger every year. Kids on bikes in the driveway. Deer at the tree line at dusk, and in the fall, the sound of geese moving through toward the marsh.
Then a Saturday morning: coffee on the porch, the truck hitched up, and twenty minutes later you’re idling out of Swan Creek into Lake Erie with the sun coming up over the water.
That’s the life these homesites are meant to support. Room to breathe, room to work, and the lake close enough to be part of the routine rather than a special occasion.
What Comes Next
If you’ve been looking for a place to build in southeast Michigan that doesn’t feel like a subdivision, you may want to keep an eye on this one.
Harmony Hills Ventures acquires and improves rural land across the Midwest and South. A portion of every development supports causes we believe in.
