Cassiar Cannery, Lot 44, Cassiar Dr., Port Edward, B.C.
Asking price: $9-million
Lot size: 74 acres
Property taxes: $6,275.18
Listing agents: Paul Hague, Nicole Eastman, Amjot Sahi, Sotheby’s International Realty Canada
The backstory
When Justine Crawford bought a salmon cannery that was more than 100 years old at the mouth of the Skeena River, she had no plans except to find the kind of space where she’d never see the neighbours unless she wanted to.
That was almost 20 years ago in 2006, and Ms. Crawford had no inkling that she and her husband, Mark Bell, would convert the site of Cassiar Cannery into a tourist destination, featured in travel media across the continent (including as one of The Globe and Mail’s Hidden Canada gems in 2018). Founded in 1889, the remote cannery was one of hundreds that at one time sprang up along Canada’s West Coast to pack up the local catch and ship it for sale to points south and east. Cassiar continued on until the 1980s when it finally gave way to more modern forms of processing the Pacific fisheries. After that, it languished, slowly mouldering until Ms. Crawford came along.
“We came up to Prince Rupert and got dragged around all these depressing houses,” she said. Then she saw black-and-white photos of the cannery in a real-estate magazine, but her realtor refused to take her. “Too far, too remote, too messy,” Ms. Crawford was told.
Nevertheless, she persisted, and after a few more days of cajoling they travelled about 30 minutes out of town to the 74-acre site that climbs up from a broad waterfront on the salty estuary into the forested foothills behind it. “We were hooked within 15 seconds,” she said. “The setting is spectacular.”
That said, it was also a mostly abandoned series of buildings that had once performed all the functions of a small town and commercial fishery on the frontier of the province. When she arrived, it was practically an industrial waste site.
The cannery was founded in 1889.Sotheby’s International Realty Canada
“We just kind of jumped in with both feet – sink or swim. It took us a full year, dawn to dusk, to clear the space,” Ms. Crawford said. It not only had the remains of the cannery buildings on the almost four-acre wooden dock, but also about 220 tonnes of scrap metal – everything from dead minivans to industrial refrigeration units.
“These canneries were little communities,” she said. “At its peak, it had a thousand workers,” many of whom came from the local area and many of whom spread out around the country after it closed. “I had someone return a silver coffee set from the 1950s, it was from the Cassiar company,” she said. It appears to have been given as a gift to a supplier to celebrate a 50-year business relationship. “Now I serve my guests with it when I’m doing an event.”
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The cannery today
Ms. Crawford lives in the indigo-purple house on the end of the row of brightly coloured cabins, which have all been restored to life from a pretty patchwork existence when they first found them.
“When I first got here, we slept in one house and had to cook in another house and shower in another house,” she said. Today, all of the houses feature furnishings and finishes Mr. Bell fashioned out of wood salvaged on the property over the years.
Mr. Bell was a shipwright, a builder of wooden boats, and he took to the task of restoring one of the five still-standing homes (used in the past for he cannery’s management) for their own use, and then moved on to the other homes (which are stilt-mounted to keep the tides at bay.)
They were able to beachcomb quite a bit of lumber that washed up on their waterfront; cedar, fir, all sorts. So much lumber that they eventually invested in the kind of wood shop machinery that can turn raw logs into planed planks of lumber. Among the projects that wood has been used for is restoring the decks for all five houses.
After almost six years of work, they hosted their first tourist bookings, and things only developed from there.
All the cabins have multiple bedrooms and their own fully functional kitchens (most people who visit cook their own meals). Some who visit prefer to be completely beyond the reach of modern technology, so there are guest houses with no Internet access.
Each cabin has a kitchen so guests can cook their own meals.Sotheby’s International Realty Canada
While it started with simple self-catered guest house rentals, over time, the Cannery’s tourism offerings have expanded. Once, bookings were dominated by oil-patch sport-fishermen, but when the economic shocks of the mid-20-teens hit her customers hard, Ms. Crawford needed to find new ways to bring people her way.
Prince Rupert is about as far north on the British Columbia coast as you can go before you run into Alaska; if you don’t fly in, it’s either a 16-hour car ride or a two-day train trip (three times a week it stops right at Cassiar, which sits along the line) from Vancouver.
The remoteness became a feature, not a bug, and Cassiar has become a stop on travel loops that start in places like Jasper, Alta., and then explore the B.C.’s north.
“We get a lot of people who want to come and take a little bit of a rest. … This is where they come to recharge,” Ms. Crawford said. She also began inviting ecologists to come stay and study the local wildlife, which has turned into an annual week-long themed event. She also began to offer themed retreats where guests would have a more catered and curated stay. “They get dinner and spa services, morning meditation, breakfast, walks, yoga, lunch, a craft module – this one is bog-witch baskets made out of tree branches – more spa, and a big canoe ride” on a 20-person ocean-going canoe, all spread over a few days.
If the next buyer wants to keep the tourism business going, there’s a wait-list of people wanting to come and a longer list of people who’ve been and want to come back.
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Ms. Crawford’s husband died in 2021, just after the cannery began accepting guests again after a COVID-19-era shutdown in 2020. Since then, Ms. Crawford has been pretty much working non-stop to build the cannery’s hospitality business. “I have two speeds: I’m up and full bore or I’m lying down,” she jokes.
She’s only looking to sell now because her son will soon be going to school on Vancouver Island and she doesn’t want to be quite so far away from him. And even though it’s still possible for the site to go back to a more industrial purpose after she sells, she’s hoping the buyer has something like her experience with it.
“I hope it’s a family, because I think that’s where she [the cannery] does best,” she said “I don’t really want to sell her because I’ll never get a place like this again.”
Early on in her time owning the cannery, Ms. Crawford came to see it not so much as her property, but that she was a chapter in its story.
“I didn’t get it before I came here: It’s a unique spot that kind of has a life of its own. Its history was so much bigger and longer than me; you realize you’re just a steward,” she said. “When she was a cannery, she performed magnificently. Our chapter was to save it.”
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