Mushroom House Tours

Walking Tours

The Charlevoix Historical Society offers walking tours that focus on the Earl Young Park Avenue houses. Tours begin at the Charlevoix Historical Society museum at Harsha House. The guide will then take you to the Charlevoix Public Library (during open hours), which was once a former grade school, now one of the most beautiful public libraries in Northern Michigan. The tour continues to the Earl Young “mushroom houses” along Park Avenue and Clinton Street. Tours conclude at Hoffmann Park on downtown Park Avenue for a view of Charlevoix’s channel bridge and beyond the channel to Earl Young’s masterpiece, the Weathervane Inn restaurant.

The houses are private residences. Tours do not include the interiors. Each tour takes approximately 90 minutes. Total walking distance is less than 1.25 miles, with minimal elevation change. We ask that interested parties provide 48 -hour notice when booking a tour.

Earl Young
Charlevoix’s “Master Builder in Stone” Earl Young was born March 31, 1889, in Mancelona, Michigan and moved to Charlevoix with his family at age 11. An insurance and real estate agent by trade, this self-taught builder began his craft in 1919.  His first project was his personal home located on Park Avenue. He would continue to build for the next fifty years, completing 26 residential and 4 commercial properties, most of which remain today.

Each of Young’s houses are unique and were designed to blend in with its surrounding landscape. They are constructed of indigenous materials, hand-selected by Young, like boulders found along the shores of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, or in farm fields.  Each house was built to compliment it’s natural surroundings.  Young’s style often consists of houses with unique placement of stone, wide, wavy eaves; exposed rafter tails; cedar-shake roofs; and a horizontal emphasis in design.