Singapore, the lumber boomtown the dunes swallowed

There’s a whole town under the dunes just north of Saugatuck, and you’d never know it from the beach. It was called Singapore, and for about forty years it was a real place — sawmills, a bank, two dozen-odd buildings, ships built right at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River where it spills into Lake Michigan.

A New York land speculator named Oshea Wilder laid it out in 1836. He thought the spot could grow into a port to rival Chicago or Milwaukee, and for a while the bet looked good. The mills ran hard, lake schooners came and went, and the town shipped lumber out across the Great Lakes. Then 1871 happened. Fires tore through Chicago, Holland, and Peshtigo that autumn, and the whole region needed boards to rebuild. Singapore’s mills cut everything they could reach. Within a couple of years the hills around town were stripped bare.

That turned out to be the town’s undoing. The pine roots had been holding the dunes in place. With the trees gone, the west wind off the lake had nothing to stop it, and it pushed the sand inland — old accounts say something like ten feet a year. The dunes crept up over the doorsteps and didn’t stop. People left. By the mid-1870s Singapore was finished, and the sand kept coming until it closed over the rooftops.

A few buildings got out before the burial. In winter, when the river froze, men slid the bank and some of the houses downstream on logs to Saugatuck, where a couple of them still stand. Everything else is down there yet, under the grass and sand on the north bank. Walk the dunes near the river mouth and you’re walking on roofs.