CREDITS: Charlevoix Historical Society

Looking Back: Yachts of the rich and famous have long visited Charlevoix

Petoskey News-Review | DAVID MILES | 11 August 2023

Here is another clip from our small set of 16mm film from 1938. The 192-foot Sylvia enters the channel and docking in Round Lake (You’ll see the old swing bridge at the very end!)

The yacht was one of five identical vessels built by the Bath Iron Works Corporation of Bath, Maine in the late 1920s.

It was owned by Logan Thompson, head of an Ohio paper company and member of the Belvedere Club. Some of its crewmen included; James Bellinger, Jerry Simpson, Joe Arvilla, Ted Shupeck, Johnny Clausen, and Harold Behnedsen.

It is known that Katherine Hepburn and Howard Hughes chartered the Sylvia for various trips, however, we don’t know if they ever came to Charlevoix.

Belvedere History – Industrialist, Logan Thomson of Cincinnati and the Belvedere Club, head of the Champion paper company, was bringing in his series of yachts named Sylvia after his wife.

The 133-foot Sylvia IV, launched in 1926, even enjoyed its own huge custom-built boathouse on the south shore of Round Lake, currently transformed into the Harbour Club condominium structure.

When Thomson decided to purchase the 192-foot Sylvia (named without the expected Roman numeral designation) in 1930, he offered the Sylvia IV plus boathouse to his Belvedere friend Ransom E. Olds.

Olds was the founder of the Oldsmobile automobile company and a summer resident of Charlevoix for a quarter of a century. He called his new vessel the Reomar IV, the name formed after his initials and the first three letters of his subsidiary “mar”ine business.

Thomson continued to make Charlevoix the home port for his yacht, considered the most gorgeous vessel ever to part the waters of Charlevoix.

But history unfortunately caught up with the two men, as it did with McDonald and many other yacht owners. Sensing what was about to happen in an increasingly troubled world, Thomson donated the Sylvia to the government for military service seven months before Pearl Harbor.

It sailed out of Charlevoix in April of 1941, headed for refitting at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The Reomar IV followed suit in 1942. Neither vessel was ever seen in Charlevoix again.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Looking Back: Yachts of the rich and famous have long visited Charlevoix