John Roen

Summary

John Roen was a Norway-born Great Lakes captain and shipping entrepreneur who began his working life on Beaver Island and built a shipping, salvage, and shipbuilding business based first in Charlevoix and then in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. He enters the held record as a shipwrecked sailor put ashore on the island in his youth, and the December 1970 obituaries in the Beaver Beacon and the Charlevoix Courier trace that beginning through four decades of vessels, companies, and one widely reported salvage.

History

Roen was born in Tyssse, Norway, on October 20, 1887, and came to the United States on borrowed money in 1906, working as a sailor from his early youth. The Beacon says the vessel he was working on ran aground and broke up off Looney’s Point on Beaver Island; he made it ashore with fifty cents in his pocket. He was taken in by Gus Mielke, who owned the sawmill on the site of what later became Beaver Haven Marina, and the two men spent that winter cutting timber. The Beacon says the proceeds became Roen’s first vessel, the 65-foot Schnoton, which he used to haul fruit and pulpwood to Great Lakes ports; the Courier instead names his first boat as the Marquis Roen, a small freighter built in 1920 — see Evidence and limits below.

In 1920 Roen acquired the freighter Fred W. Green and converted it to a self-unloader for hauling gravel and stone, using Charlevoix as its home port until 1931. That year he moved his operation to Sturgeon Bay, where he founded the Roen Steamship Company, the Roen Transportation Company, and the Sturgeon Bay Shipyard and Drydock Company — the Courier notes the shipyard had been sold “in recent years” by the time of his death. His interests also included the Charlevoix Transit Company, headquartered in Boston. His tugs, described by both papers as among the most powerful on the Great Lakes, hauled barges converted from car ferries; four bore his name and another was named the Purvis, and the Courier records that they continued to visit Charlevoix with cargoes.

Roen’s most widely reported feat was the salvage of the 600-foot ore carrier George M. Humphrey, which sank in the Straits of Mackinac in the early 1940s after a collision with another vessel. The Courier reports that after insurance companies had forfeited their claims to the wreck, the federal government took bids to remove it as a hazard to navigation; Roen won the work using marine-salvage methods the Courier calls “never before tried.” The Beacon adds that he built models and rehearsed the plan in a bathtub before the actual operation, removed the ship’s cargo of ore and coal, and slipped cables and air-filled flotation chambers under the hull; as the hull broke the surface and began to roll, he cut the cables with a shotgun before it could capsize. The Courier dates the raising to 1944 and says the vessel was towed to Sturgeon Bay, repaired, and recommissioned as the Captain John Roen; both papers agree his company sailed her for two years before she was sold, with the Beacon giving the sale price as an even one million dollars.

Roen kept ties to Charlevoix after leaving it: the Courier identifies him as a director and, at his death, a stockholder of the Charlevoix County State Bank, and says that until his final years he returned every summer aboard his yacht, the Sonia.

Roen died on Sunday, December 6, 1970, at Sturgeon Bay, where he had lived for about forty years. Funeral services were held at the Davis Mortuary in Sturgeon Bay, with burial in a Sturgeon Bay cemetery the Courier does not name. He was 83. He was survived by his widow, Solveig; two daughters, Mrs. Charles (Hilda) Asher and Mrs. Richard (Sonia) Greaves; a son, Marquis Roen; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren, all of Sturgeon Bay. The Courier suggests memorial contributions to the Bay View Lutheran Church of Sturgeon Bay.

Evidence and limits

The two December 1970 accounts are retrospective obituaries, not incorporation records, vessel registries, or a complete fleet list. The Beacon calls the Schnoton Roen’s first vessel, built from timber cut with Gus Mielke on Beaver Island; the Courier instead calls the Marquis Roen, built in 1920, his first boat. Both source forms are retained as separate vessel records rather than silently reconciled. The son named Marquis Roen is also kept separate from the vessel bearing that name. Neither paper gives the burial cemetery’s name, a complete company incorporation history, or registry details for the tugs named after Roen or the tug Purvis.

The page

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Added 1 August 2026 · revised 3 August 2026. Recent changes