Earl Young - His Life and Legacy

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Realtor-Builder
Earl Young Dies

CHARLEVOIX-- Earl A. Young, 86, dean of northern Michigan realtors and developer of Boulder Park here, died Saturday at the Grandvue Medical Care Facility where he had been a patient for six weeks.

Funeral services were held Monday at the Winchester Funeral Home. The Rev. Raymond H. Giffin officiated. Interment was in Brookside cemetery.

As a realtor who had entered the field early in the century, Mr. Young promoted Charlevoix as a summer resort throughout the midwest all his adult life. Shortly after World War I, he built the first summer home in what was to it become Boulder Park where all construction utilized the boulders left behind by the great glacier. An artist as well as a builder, he designed many homes in the community of this stone that was to become his trademark. In the early 1950s he fulfilled a dream when he remodeled a 70-year-old mill located on the north bank of the Pine River into a showplace of the community, the Weathervane Inn. Later he designed The Lodge and, in the 1960s, the Weathervane Terrace which, like his other stone structures scattered through the com munity, will continue to stand , as monuments to his artistry and imagination.

With his activities limited by failing eyesight, he devoted his recent years to writing a history of Charlevoix as he remembered it. He was an avid photographer as a young man and the book will be illustrated with many of his early photographs of Charlevoix. The book is presently ready for the printers.

Mr. Young was born in Mancelona March 31,1889, and came to Charlevoix with his parents as a young man. In 1915 he was married to the former Irene Harsha. They always resided here. He was a member of the First Congregational Church and the Charlevoix-Antrim Board of Realtors.

He is survived by his widow; three daughters, Mrs. Robert L. (Louise) Gill, Mrs. George (Marguerite) Currie and Mrs. Paul J.J. (Virginia) Olsen, all of Charlevoix; 13 grandchildren and six great grandchildren.

The family suggests that anyone wishing to honor Mr. Young's memory contribute in his name to the Congregational Church Building Fund.