Charlevoix’s Lake Michigan beach area, lighthouse, piers, and lower channel developed as a major maritime landscape shaped by public works, navigation aids, and a steady flow of vessels. A U.S. government fish hatchery was built in 1917 and, when it opened, was the largest Federal hatchery in the United States; in recent years the building served as the State of Michigan's Charlevoix Fisheries Research Station. The Life-Saving Service station, later named the Coast Guard station, was commissioned in 1900 and built in 1901 on what is now open land adjacent to the fisheries research building; it remained in Charlevoix until Coast Guard facilities moved across Round Lake to the entrance into Lake Charlevoix in 1962, and the building was razed in 1965. Above it stood Charlevoix’s first water tower, built in 1906, more than 100 feet tall, visible over twenty miles out in Lake Michigan, and a mariner’s landmark until it was pulled down in 1995. Charlevoix's first regulation lighthouse was built in 1885 on the north pier, made of wood and painted white, then moved to the south pier in 1911 and painted red; by 1948 it had deteriorated almost to collapse and was replaced by the steel structure still standing. The north pier’s rotted wood trestle was replaced by a metal one by the end of the 19th century, and after later replacements the current concrete and steel structure was installed in the late 1980s. The cutting of the upper and lower channels between July and early October 1869, linking Pine Lake, later called Lake Charlevoix, to Round Lake and then to Lake Michigan, opened Charlevoix County and northwest lower Michigan to regional, Midwest, national, and world commerce, and within two decades Charlevoix became one of the most important ports on the Great Lakes. Thousands of vessels used the channel and Round Lake, including passenger ships such as the Manitou, which visited for more than seven decades mainly from Chicago and could make the Chicago-Charlevoix run in twenty hours nonstop; large lake freighters entered from the late 1950s into the 1990s to deliver coal near Boyne City, sometimes stopping traffic on Bridge Street for up to half an hour; powered tugs and schooners worked the port and lakes, with nearly forty steam-powered fishing tugs operating out of Charlevoix between 1873 and 1913; yachts such as the 192-foot Sylvia used Charlevoix as home port or destination; and Coast Guard vessels such as the 180-foot buoy-tending cutter Sundew served from 1958 to 1980. The 552-foot Challenger, launched in 1906 and later the official cement carrier for the Medusa Cement Company plant on South Point from 1967, was decommissioned in 2013 after 107 years of service, and only its big propeller remains in Charlevoix along the south channel walkway.