A lumber boomtown buried under the dunes

The brick chimney standing among the campsites near the park entrance is the easiest thing to miss and the most surprising thing here. It is 120 feet of the town that used to be. Where Port Crescent State Park now spreads its beach and pine-covered dunes along the Pinnebog River, there was once a busy lumber town of the same name — two steam sawmills, salt works, a barrel-making cooperage, hotels, breweries, a depot and telegraph office, even a roller rink. One of the mills got so swamped salvaging timber scorched in the great fire of 1871 that it built that tall chimney to feed the boilers. It is nearly all that survives.

The town began at the river mouth around 1844 and ran hard for a couple of decades on the white pine the Thumb was covered in. Then the timber gave out and the fires came back — another swept through in 1881 — and a place that needed forests and salt had neither. The mills closed, the people drifted off, and the wind started moving sand over the streets. By the time Michigan bought the first 124 acres in 1956, Port Crescent was a ghost town in the literal sense: gone back to dune and river.

What the wind built instead is the draw now. The Pinnebog winds slow and dark through the park to meet Lake Huron, edged by some of the best sand dunes on the Saginaw Bay shore. Three miles of beach, trails climbing over forested dunes, kayaks drifting the river, and a dark night sky that makes this one of the better stargazing spots in the southern Lower Peninsula.

Pitch a tent near that chimney and you are camping in a downtown that the lake and the wind quietly erased.