Early History
Welcome to Charlevoix, the Beautiful, Michigan, population circa 3000. For well over a century Charlevoix has been one of the most important resort and commercial towns of the northwest portion of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. It is located about 50 miles southwest of the Straits of Mackinac, just over 300 miles from Chicago, and about 280 miles from Detroit.
Charlevoix from approximately 25,000 feet. The town straddles an isthmus less than a mile wide, divided by a man-made waterway called Pine River. This consists of the lower channel that leads to Lake Michigan (left) and the upper channel to Lake Charlevoix (right), the two connected by what is known as Round Lake. The settlement was originally called, like its waterway, Pine River, named so by the itinerant fisherman who first settled here for part of each year. A major landmark for them was thought to be a tall pine tree on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.
The town and its county were later named after French Jesuit priest/explorer/historian Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix (1682-1761). A brilliant scholar, Father Charlevoix was chosen by the Regency government of King Louis XV to go to the New World in 1720 to try to determine how far the British had penetrated into the continent. The pretext was an inspection of French missions from the St. Lawrence River, around the Great Lakes, then down the Mississippi River to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. Father Charlevoix was, in essence, a spy.
From descriptions in his letters and journals, it is known that Father Charlevoix passed this way and found shelter from a windstorm on Fisherman’s Island a few miles south of here on July 31, 1721. It is not known why, in 1843, Charlevoix County was named after him. Travelers by water said they were “going to Charlevoix,” meaning the county, but the port to which they sailed was Pine River. For several years the settlement was known by both names with little confusion. “Charlevoix” became the town’s official name in 1879.
Pine River was first inhabited by nomadic fishermen who did not put down roots. The first permanent settlers were Medad and Phoebe Thompson, Mormons lured in 1854 by the call of King James Strang who had settled large Beaver Island northwest of Pine River in the mid 1840s. But the Thompsons were disillusioned by Strang’s dictatorial, often violent ways and left soon after they arrived. They crossed over to Pine River where they found land to their liking and established a farmstead on the Pine Lake shore south of the future upper channel.
The first industry to sustain Pine River was the bounty of fish to be found in Lake Michigan. Dave Eckinger, left, and Dan Swartz hold frozen “finny gold” at Booth Fisheries on the north shore of Round Lake. When the Booth Fisheries Corporation of Chicago moved their Petoskey branch 16 miles west to Charlevoix in December, 1903, bringing with them freezing lockers that would hold one million pounds of fish, Willard A. Smith, editor of the Charlevoix Sentinel newspaper, asserted that this “makes Charlevoix the largest fishing point on the Great Lakes.”
The open spaces and docks on the south shore of Round Lake were once blanketed by fish net reels wrapped in layers of gossamer netting. Miles of it were made by the hundreds of pounds every winter. In the winter of 1902, fisherman John O’Neill employed fifteen people to repair old and weave additional nets. They produced 544 new ones weighing 1600 pounds that would stretch 85 miles in the water. That spring, using fifteen men in three tugs, he set out a combined 125 miles of new and old netting throughout northern Lake Michigan.
In the mid-1860s, pioneers Hiram Rose and Amos Fox built a 900-foot dock into Lake Michigan. It was intended to be a “wooding” station to fuel steamboats that ran between Chicago and Buffalo. Narrow gauge rails along which the wood was transported can be seen the length of the dock, with wood stacks to their left ready for loading. Soon other commercial vessels used it. The Fox & Rose dock began to plug the region’s economy into that of the country and the world. Pine River/Charlevoix was now on the map. But more was needed.
With more and more commerce appearing on the town’s west side, its leaders realized that unimpeded connection to the interior had to be made or Pine River would never flourish and the region never grow. In 1869 the Charlevoix Harbor and Improvement Company was formed to take advantage of the settlement’s natural blessings. Beginning in late July, it gathered about 100 men from the area who, working in two teams toward each other, cut this 350-foot upper channel through the sandy peninsula that separated Round Lake from Pine Lake.
The following September the company turned its attention to the west and began to cut through to Lake Michigan. By October, 1869 both channels had been created—for less than $1,500. This 1880 lithograph shows the positions of the channel piers, erected in the 1870s, relative to the Fox & Rose dock. After the channel achieved its present width in 1882, the largest lake vessels could reach Round Lake. The Fox & Rose dock was no longer needed. It was not taken out but allowed to quickly perish under the fury of Lake Michigan.
Aided by the cutting and enlargement of the channels accomplished over thirteen years, along with impressive improvements within the harbor begun around 1873, little Pine River was opened at the head of a major waterway that penetrated deep into the land to terminate at and serve Boyne City on the north and East Jordan on the south. It was as if a key had been turned to open a lock. This was the beginning of the making of Charlevoix County. From now on, the world began to beat a pathway to Pine River’s door and beyond as never before.
Even before this breakthrough, a lumber mill went into operation in 1868 at the northwest corner of Round Lake next to the channel. Three years after it opened, the mill supplied lumber for the rebuilding of Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871. In 1876, the mill’s third owner, John Nicholls, gave the business its final name, the Charlevoix Lumber Company. To the right are two three-masted schooners ready to take on lumber. They were called “three-stickers.” Today this is the site of the Edgewater Inn hotel and condominiums.
In winter, logs were brought to the mill from the lumber camps of southern Charlevoix County by horse-drawn sledges. They entered town on State Street, seen here between Mason and Clinton Streets, turned right onto Main Street (later Park Avenue), traveled one block to Bridge Street, turned left, crossed the bridge, went up the north hill, turned right onto East Dixon Avenue and reached the lumber company’s property. If necessary, streets were watered down to freeze for the gliding transport of these gigantic loads.