Greene Point Marina & Mobile Home Park in Sandy Pond has been owned by the same family for over a century. The fourth generation is now in charge
By Stefan Yablonski
There are several women-owned businesses in and around Oswego County. Many have been around for quite some time.
However, Greene Point Marina & Mobile Home Park LLC can trace its roots back more than a century.
The single-family business spans four generations and 119 years.
Welcome to Greene Point Marina, a hidden gem of Oswego County.
The scent of campfires’ smoke mingles with the pine on the Lake Ontario breeze. Located on the east coast of the lake, the 95-slip marina and campground is run by two sisters.
“We’ve been here our whole lives. Our great-grandfather built three two-story cottages back in 1905; they were all pine, knotty pine, tongue and groove. People used to write on the walls ‘I was here in 19-whatever.’ I think they built them on railroad ties or whatever they had,” said Cheryl Yerdon. “They really started the business back then. Before that it was just cattle pastures and chestnut groves.”
She and her sister, Cathleen Goodnough, run the business; taking the reins from their mother, Linda Goodnough.
The land has been in their family for a long time.
Stephen Lindsey was one of the first settlers there.
“But really it was our great-grandfather who put the marina together in 1905,” Cheryl explained.
The two sisters are in charge of the marina and mobile home park located on Sandy Pond, right next to Lake Ontario. They are the great-granddaughters of Captain Lindsey Greene and Faith Christine Greene.
Captain Greene and Faith Christine Greene had two daughters.
“We are the fourth generation to operate this business. We’re a marina and a mobile home park. Our great-grandfather started it. He passed away and then his wife maintained it,” Cathy said.
“After our great-grandfather died, Faith took it over and ran it with her two daughters — one of which was our grandmother, Christine Sawyer. Now mom has it and is running it with us — her two daughters,” Cheryl said. “We think that’s a great parallel!”
“I am the mobile home park manager and Cathleen is the marina manager,” Cheryl continued.
However their job descriptions don’t always fit into a nice little title.
“We do what is needed to keep all of our folks happy here at Greene Point,” she added.
“I operate equipment; do what I need to do to keep everything running. I’m the dock master. Cheryl is the mobile home park manager. We have a part-time helper here and we hire out individually contract labor for items that need to be repaired in the park,” Cathy added.
“It’s been a lot of hard work,” she said. “We flooded and had to rebuild in 2017 and then it flooded again in 2019. We worked on the docks and breakwall — kind of put our place back together after the 2017 flooding and again 2019. We have a beautiful 17-mile-long white sand beach.
It’s one of the best beaches around that’s only accessible by boat. We have pontoon boat rental and trailer rentals that are right on the water.”
Summer destination
Since 1905, scores of families have enjoyed the serene views from Greene Point. Linda’s grandfather, Captain Greene, established Greene Point as a family resort area.
Today hundreds of people call Greene Point their summer home, Cheryl said. Many of the campers are multi-generational having returned summers for decades, she added.
“It’s funny how people just came here and they would work for room and board and stay the summer,” Cheryl said. “They might have professed to be builders, but they really weren’t. They didn’t even have the house at the end of the road, built that around 1940.”
“This building [office] was built around 1945 – 1948,” Cathy added.
They started out with a little yellow building, a boathouse and an ice house; they’d cut all the ice in the winter and that’s where they stored it.
Nearly 120 years of memorabilia is packed into every nook and cranny at the office.
Captain Lindsey Greene was “a traveling showman.” He and his crew had four ships and traveled up and down the intracoastal waterways, collecting rare animals and artifacts, according to the sisters.
He’d charge people a small fee to board his ship and see the strange collections from his travels.
There was a museum here after they put the boats aside.
“They created the three main camps in 1905 that serve as the base for the marina today,” Cheryl explained. “They built the museum, too, where they took all the artifacts off the boats and put them on display.”
In the summer, tourists would come to “Whale City” to see the museum at Greene Point.
“The stuff was all sold to a couple of guys from Connecticut. I have no idea where all that stuff went to — but there was a giant sunfish, all kinds of things in this museum that people wouldn’t have seen because people didn’t travel,” she said.
One of the last boats was a 51-foot double mast sailboat which ended up in the docks over in Sodus.
“It’s what they used to travel up and down the coastal waterways with and they would summer here. They would go down to Cuba, the Bahamas and pick up all this stuff,” she said.
Captain Greene’s ship eventually sank, but he was knee-deep into building a stationary family business by then. However, you can still see the hull of what the family calls the ‘pirate ship’ — at the bottom of Sodus Bay when the water is low, she added.
The whole shore at Greene Point was dotted with little camps. The museum was made into three or four apartments for people to rent.
“Grandpa and Grandma — Robert and Christine Sawyer — helped build the cottages and catered to fishermen,” Cathy said. “They would come into town via the train at Lacona. Robert would pick them up at the train station and bring them down to Greene Point.”
“To be honest, I can’t remember not operating a boat or working behind the counter,” Cathy mused. “I worked the snack bar for the longest time and eventually graduated to the marina.”
“We’ve pretty much been taking care of the public since we were very young. I started when I was 11 — you couldn’t do that now,” she quipped.
Praise from mom
“They’re doing a good job of keeping everything running smoothly,” Linda Goodnough said of her daughters. “I’m 88 years old and don’t do as much as I did.”
Their mother has put in her time here behind the counter for nearly 60 years and its time she enjoyed her retirement, the sisters agreed.
“She still comes to the marina every day to visit with whoever comes in the door,” Cheryl said.
There are five parks in the mobile home park and each one has a canal.
“We have seven canals. Our grandfather fashioned them after Miami. If you go to Florida, you’ll see a canal behind a trailer. Our grandfather saw people’s homes, trailers or camps on one side and they’d dock their boat right beside it. So he fashioned Greene Point after places he had seen down south,” Cheryl said.
“Our intent is to carry on that tradition and make Greene Point a family favorite vacation spot,” she said. “The three of us have been running it since 2006.”
They are taking a wait and see attitude as to whether or not the next generation will continue the family tradition.
Weathering the Storms
Greene Point Marina, owned by Cathy Goodnough and Cheryl Yerdon in the town of Sandy Creek, serves the recreational and commercial boating market on Sandy Pond and Lake Ontario. The business had substantial damages from lakeshore flooding a few years back, but was able to completely rebuild in phases between 2020 and 2022 with financial assistance provided by Operation Oswego County and the County of Oswego Industrial Development Agency (COIDA).
