Cottage for sale

There was a time when one in ten homes in the United States contained a fractional horsepower electric motor made in one of George W. Hoddy's factories.

Universal Electric Co., started by Hoddy during World War II, grew to employ more than 2,000 employees in eight factories in the United States, England, India and Thailand.

Hoddy's engineering acumen was in such demand that, during the war years, the U.S. Government secretly whisked him away for two days each week to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project that unlocked the secrets of the atom and resulted in the world's first nuclear weapons.

Today, George W. Hoddy is 98 years of age and living in Owosso, near Lansing, in Michigan's lower peninsula.

Upstate, Hoddy has a beautiful eight-bedroom home on Lake Huron, 40 miles due south of Sault Ste. Marie near Cedarville. Location map

There, on 27 acres on Joker Pointe, he used to bring the Universal Electric brass for corporate brainstorming sessions.

But Hoddy doesn't get to the Upper Peninsula much these days.

So he's selling the place by auction this Saturday, December 6.

Wall Street Journal takes notice of the sale

The property's been attracting a lot of interest in luxury real estate circles.

"The peninsular property is the kind of place someone looking for solitude would head for, with 300-year-old cedars, 2,950 square feet of shoreline, and lots of deer and turkey," said a recent write-up in the Wall Street Journal.

"It's so peaceful there between the forest and the shore, we could gain a perspective we never could in the city," Hoddy told the newspaper.

Hoddy's Swiss Chalet-styled lodge is located on the point at the top left of our photo, on a 2.81-acre waterfront lot that includes the 160-foot dock visible to the right of the point.

Calumet Farm auctioneer

Also being auctioned are ten lots lining the cove to the right of Hoddy's summer retreat.

Saturday's auction will be conducted by the Alabama-based J.P. King Auction Co., which includes Kentucky's famous Calumet Farm ($17 million) among the many hundreds of properties it has auctioned since 1915.

On average, the auction house has sold one $5-million-plus property every 90 days for the past 15 years.

To see a photo gallery of Hoddy's Joker Pointe property, please click here. To read the J.P. King auction listing, click here.

To learn more about George Warren Hoddy, click on this.