Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine | JUL ’19 65From his childhood home, a pretty little Victorian on
Charlevoix’s State Street that still stands, Earl Young could
walk to the Lake Michigan shore in a hop-skip. After heading
west on Park Avenue, he turned his back on the booming
turn-of-the-last-century downtown and quickly covered the
short block to the cobalt water and sandy beach littered
with wet, glistening stones. Those stones were magic to him.
From his youth and throughout his lifetime, Young connected
with rocks—from the shores, the fields and the quarries of
Northern Michigan—in an almost supernatural way. It was
as if they spoke to him of what they could become; how
one could fit into another to construct a building, chimney
or fence. They whispered of their connection to the earth,
the water and the landscape; of giving a family shelter; of
becoming a part of magnificent fireplaces that would draw
families to them—and thus together.
Many years after those hikes, when he’d become a designer
and builder, Young was known to bury or sometimes sink
rocks and boulders that he found and hoped to use in a
building one day. “Stones have their own personalities,” Young
told a reporter for the Detroit Free Press in 1973. “People say
I’m crazy when I say so, but they really do. Why, I found
a stone that weighed 160 tons. It was formed 350 million
years ago at the bottom of a warm sea and was carried here
10,000 years ago by glaciers.”
Young was 84 at the time of that interview and his posterity
was already scattered around Charlevoix in 31 structures of
his design that are marked by whimsical chimneys, wavy
roofs clad in shake shingles, arched doorways, enchanted
fireplaces, low ceilings, turrets and genius use of stone that
can run the gamut to jewel-colored boulders to stacked
limestone. They’ve been called Hobbit houses, mushroom
houses, Hansel and Gretel houses, Flintstone houses, Harry
Potter houses and many other names. Look at them closely
and you find hints of a Swiss chalet, a Cotswold cottage, an
Asian pagoda, European castles and Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Prairie Style. The truth is, each building is so different and
unique that they defy any one descriptor.
A Realtor by trade, Young was a self-taught photographer,
architect, builder and mason. He read voraciously and in
later years, he and his wife, Irene, who shared his artist’s
soul, were enthusiastic world travelers. He took inspiration
mostly from the earth and landscape, but he wasn’t afraid
to lift cues from the emerging architectural styles of the era.
He worked without blueprints, drawing pictures in the dirt
to show his workmen what he wanted built—unless Irene
figured out what was in his brain in time to sketch it out
for the workmen.ROCK HOUSE
RENAISSANCE
ALMOST 50 YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, CHARLEVOIX’S
EARL YOUNG AND HIS STONE MASTERPIECES
ARE GETTING FRESH, NEW RECOGNITION.TEXT BY ELIZABETH EDWARDS
PHOTOS BY RACHEL HAGGERTYOPENING SPREAD: THE MUSHROOM HOUSE ON PARK AVENUE. THE WINDOWS ARE FROM A POLISH CASTLE.
ABOVE TOP: THE SUCHER HOUSE ON PARK AVENUE. BOTTOM: ROSE COTTAGE ON THE GROUNDS OF THE PANAMA HOUSE
IN BOULDER PARK.