The Belvedere and Chicago Clubs
Near Charlevoix, Michigan
The stately Victorian cottages ringing Round Lake are not ordinary summer homes. They belong to two of the oldest private summer colonies in the Midwest. The Belvedere Club began in eighteen seventy-eight, when a group of Baptists from Kalamazoo, who had been offered twenty-five acres along Round Lake for six hundred and twenty-five dollars, provided they built on it quickly.
They formed a summer resort association, and within a year a pier, a bathhouse, and the first cottages had gone up on the terraces above the water. In eighteen eighty-seven they built the forty-room Belvedere Hotel, later enlarged to about eighty-five rooms, which over the decades hosted a remarkable guest list, including the crime-fighter Eliot Ness and the author Edgar Rice Burroughs. In nineteen twenty-three the members built a casino and formally renamed themselves the Belvedere Club.
Just across the water, the Chicago Club drew wealthy families up from Illinois by steamer and train. It stayed small, only around thirty cottages, but at the turn of the century it was said that this handful of summer homes held more millionaires than lived in most entire cities. Together these two clubs turned Charlevoix from a rough lumber port into one of the most fashionable summer destinations in the Great Lakes.
