IS JIMMY HOFFA STILL HERE?

KILLARNEY MOUNTAIN LODGE — Moose and black bears occasionally wander the grounds of this historic resort on Georgian Bay’s rugged north shore.

But nobody gets concerned until a beaver waddles ashore, because Killarney Mountain Lodge is now home to the world’s largest log-built conference centre.

It looks delicious to beavers and magnificent to humans.

The 2,500 trees London lawyer Holden Rhodes planted at the 72-year-old resort he bought five years ago have been wrapped with plastic tubes to keep beavers at bay. But it was the 500 people busily building Canada House last year that kept the beavers from chewing on the pine logs from Ontario and Douglas fir trees from British Columbia that eventually became this palace of timber.

Now that the 34,000-square-foot conference centre is up and open, Rhodes and his wife, Carey, are hoping a steady flow of vacationers, wedding parties, convention delegates and those looking for fine dining will scare beavers away from the impressive Canada House.

Rhodes named his conference centre Canada House because it displays the primary features of Canada: rocks, trees, water galore, big space and fabulous views.

It’s one of Ontario’s finest meeting places, but it has no subway connection. It’s 430 kilometres north of Toronto and 110 kilometres southwest of Sudbury, but it does sit on Canada’s 400-year-old principal canoe route

Little has changed in the village of Killarney since executives of Detroit’s Fruehauf Trailer Company arrived here in the late 1940s to build a remote hideaway so its senior executives, best customers and principal suppliers could escape from the pressures of big business in the city.

You could only reach the village by boat or float plane and it offered some of the finest fishing, hunting, hiking and sunsets on the continent. Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa used to come to this wilderness to negotiate labour deals in comfort with Fruehauf execs between poker games. There are rumours that he is still here.

At age 38, Maury East and his wife, Annabelle, bought the private retreat in 1962 and swung open its thick wooden doors to the travelling public. That’s when Ontario decided to connect Killarney to the rest of the world and built a 65-kilometre paved highway through the woods to connect with Highway 69, the principal highway between Southern Ontario and Sudbury.

The East family operated the 14-hectare Killarney Mountain Lodge for 53 years, selling it to Rhodes five years ago.

After graduating from a British law school and postgraduate law studies at Western, Rhodes became a partner in London’s McKenzie Lake law firm, practising corporate law.

In his spare time, he launched a small agency that traced the ownership and maintenance history of used cars across Canada. His part-time firm, Carproof, grew substantially until he sold it to the owners of Carfax in the U.S. for $650 million.

Rhodes has poured $42 million into KML, upgrading the various cabins, cottages and motel suites that can accommodate 301 visitors, plus another 94 at neighbouring Sportman’s Inn, also owned by Rhodes.

About 25 per cent of Killarney’s 500 residents are employed at the resort. The village and resort sit on the Killarney channel, a body of calm waters protected from the waves of Georgian Bay by uninhabited George Island.

More than 725 boats, averaging 12 metres in length, but some at nearly 34 metres, were moored at KML’s marina last season, 60 per cent of them visiting from the U.S. Most days, there are usually two or three float planes at the marina as well.

Last year, the channel was full of float planes when a bush plane pilots group held its annual general meeting in Canada House.

Thousands of canoes also arrive at Killarney each summer. Close by is the historic French River — Ontario’s first major highway — which was the principal route 400 years ago for Coureur des bois, wilderness explorers and Indigenous travellers moving from Montreal to Georgian Bay.

The French River is the first declared heritage river in Canada and is still a popular canoe route.

The nearly 162,000-hectare Killarney Provincial Park sits next door to the village. The wilderness park has 183 campsites on 50 separate lakes, 80 kilometres of marked hiking trails, 11 different canoe routes, is open year-round and last year was Ontario’s first provincial park to be designated a Dark Sky Preserve. There are fewer than 100 such preserves in the world and 19 are in Canada.

Rhodes plans to make KML nearly as popular in winter as it is in summer with snowmobile rentals, cross-country skiing, ice fishing, star gazing into a clear, dark sky and outdoor campfires.

If you prefer indoor campfires, Canada House has two of the largest stone fireplaces built in Ontario.

More than 15,000 hours of masonry work went into building the two fireplaces, plus all the stone flooring and walls used throughout Canada House. Some of the stone comes from a quarry in Wiarton on the Bruce Peninsula, plus pink granite from Manitoulin Island. And there is plenty of exposed pink granite protruding through the grass on the lodge’s 14-hectare campus.

Rhodes is no stranger to Killarney and the vicinity. His mother and his grandmother were both born in the village and he spent many summers in his youth exploring the area woods, the waters and the village.

His grandmother worked at the lodge for East. His family goes back practically to when Killarney was founded as a fur trading post in 1820.

For many years, the village was known as Shebahonaning, Ojibwa for “safe passage.” The village and the lodge had proposed a joint celebration of the community’s 200th anniversary on July 1, but Rhodes said the celebration has been postponed to 2021.

Canada House displays paintings by Indigenous painters on all its walls, many from the Wiikwemkoong First Nation on Manitoulin Island.

Two dozen ceremonial dancers from Wiikwemkoong participated in the official opening of Canada House last June.

Soon, Rhodes will lift a 12-ton wooden canoe paddle on to the exterior of Canada House and plans to make Killarney the paddle capital of Canada. The paddle will be a time capsule to be opened in 200 years. It’s being crafted by local resident Mike Ranta, who twice has paddled his canoe coast-to-coast across Canada.

PB